“‘What I wrote seemed to me more essentially myself than anything I did or said.’” During his life and since his death in 1942, many people wanting to understand the American South have looked to William Alexander Percy. Understanding the man, it has seemed, might help us understand the region. Born into a prominent southern »
“The devil was in the grocery store yesterday . . .” The first year of graduate school, it was the questionsthat woke me every night at 3 a.m. When will they figure out I’m an impostor, and I can’t do the work?How do I deal with the students in my own class? What can I do »
Poetry
I didn’t tell the water it was a pitchfork.I believe the water believed it was a tridenton account of the family resemblance.The road had disappeared, the field,the sundial was about to go under, meaning shadowswould have been unable to stay on schedule.When I touched the water with the pitchfork,it stopped rising, and for a week, »
Southern Missouri State University Press, 2006 These are the final lines of Mary Leary’s poem, “New Orleans (Big Stuff),” and they speak well not only for the victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, waiting on roofs or in shelters for help during and after the storm, but also for the voices collected here, in Hurricane »
“He crouched in the shade of the barn, thinking and mumbling, and the wind ripped the words from his mouth . . .” LexiconThe people are talking about budworms; they are talkingabout aphids and thrips. Under the bluff at Dismal Rock,there where the spillway foams and simmers,they are fishing and talking about pounds and allotments;they »
“It’s a kind of monster, cobbled from parts of other creatures—” On Being Asked to Pray for a VanMy evangelical brethren have let me know,via the quarterly fundraising letter,that they can’t get the gospel aroundbecause their van has given up the ghost.God in the machine, help them.
Music
Because I know her name fromrock and roll biographiesand the legendary deathof her first husband, becauseI grew up hearing her voiceon my father’s folk records,because I love the mythsthat accompany musicalmost as much as I lovemusic, I should have goneto see her when she was bookedintro the coffeehouse runby a church whose articlesof faith have »
“. . . where fat becomes faith, where juice conveys grace . . .” Meat grease, flour and water, stirred till smooth—it’s what my forebears ate, if they were lucky.
“The warden says fill and you fill it.” Photograph, 1983for Lola Bell When you and my grandmother both got old,and she could not bearthe empty house, and all your childrenwere gone as well, some nights the two of you crawled into her brass bed“like a pair of old spinsters,” your sistersays.
“So, you get up and pilfer a cigarette from your lover’s pack, smoke it in blue moonlight pushing through the bare kitchen window. Someone is listening.” So, you lie awake beside a lover of many years,and the tabby cat kneads the blanket.You have only three days’ leave.
Poetry
“. . .coupling on the dance floor, two women, alone, dancing with babies on their hips, wearing in and through, stitching up the random piece-goods of the night.” We had travelled to that old coast,six hours to New Bern, the long ferryfrom Cedar Island to Ocracoke and thento Roanoke where Manteo, for loveof the glittering »
“After two pricey tickets for speeding on Highways 17 and 43, their endless billboards screaming like previews of a coronary, I had to slow down.” After two pricey tickets for speeding on Highways 17 and 43, their endless billboards screaming like previews of a coronary, I had to slow down.