The Southern Review articles from January 1 2007

The Southern Review archives from January 1 2007

Finish.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Finish Usually a face is destroyed gradually by something typical, like age or sunlight, tanned by the same motion my father applies to shine the shoes of the men at the club; squatting on the locker room ...

Talk Show.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Talk Show My mother asks me to adjust the ears on the set. She dictates another letter to the host, asking for airtime on the show for survivors, the one with the telepath who channels the dead...

Twine.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Twine In the land of broken hearts we came to the river of understanding wading out until we disappeared we went down glimpsing opening shells and the rainbow of the sea and the grasses never touched us ...

Blood.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Blood In St. Francisville the cemetery is big as the heart of a Louisiana girl walking among the stones. It hovers and beckons and points to a river. And thoughts go downstream where New Orleans exudes a mysterious...

Woodpile.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Woodpile Murder runs in our family tree. Here is the portrait of our mother out in the yard, in her housedress; in her arms, she's holding split limbs of paper birch (her father, his son, my...

Albemarle.(Short story)
January 1, 2007... THE MAN, JIMMY PORCELL, was a large fat man with freckles like impressions from rusty nailheads patted onto his face. I never felt kidnapped, not until he showed me the photographs. The photographs were of little boys. Boys laid out dead on...

Not Stevens's Florida.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Not Stevens's Florida Ponce de Leon, I live in you today, my little bark awash in Florida such as the stars and I alone can know. These are mornings I'm sailing through your name, years falling from me as I take it in,...

Ultima Thule.(Short story)
January 1, 2007... ON HIS war OVER TO THE UNIVERSITY, Jake turns back to ask her: "You'll remember to get the Thule put on top of the Volvo? And make sure the key works?" He hands her this little bitty key. "Sure" Nova says, rubbing her eyes, wearing a black...

Facing the Earth.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Facing the Earth My foolish mind grows old, facing the earth. Two shovels propped against a wide-base elm, gravediggers hiding behind that tree. I hide too, seeing the weight of the digging they have done, the digging...

Say This.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Say This Say that a river flooded the house. Say water rose up to ruin all that was owned. Say that the water covered the whole town for a time, sweeping toys and hats, photos, skillets, hammers into a place...

Despair.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Despair Your hands resist the open groaning sound A weave undone, then keenly pulled apart Each warp and woof so carefully unwound Open up the straw, the tender fleshy heart. The handle bridged by hands superbly bent...

Winter Bath.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Winter Bath for Michael A gust of wind at windows or at door Mounts a whistling winter music played By December's sky and northern icy core Children's boots and mortal moon allayed. I love you in the warm tub of...

Meditations of the "partly colored".
January 1, 2007... [It is] a very American lesson: you need not have been to a place in order to be from there. --NIREJ SEKHON HERE'S WHAT TACY BROWN SCRAWLED in my yearbook: "Who would have thought it--a Chinese girl with a southern accent!" I was...

Three things.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Three Things There are three things you can never get back, my father always told me. The spent arrow, the spoken word, and the missed opportunity. He drew the song out with his fingertips releasing words into the...

Taking the Line.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Taking the Line We've had lessons before on measuring, my father and I, together squaring off depth, height, and width, each right angle cocked in front of one eye. Again he rolls out the tape, reaches for the pencil...

The rise and fall of Sheriff Glenn Brinkley.
January 1, 2007... BEFORE AND AFTER WE EXCHANGED "Be Mine" valentines, Glenn counted as part of my Shawboro kid pack. During the summers, our group rode bikes obsessively, up and down dirt roads, up and down field paths, up, down and around, little else to occupy...

Ants never sleep.(Short story)
January 1, 2007... HE WOULD FALL ASLEEP and wake up again. The old engine was loud. The setting sun shone strange and brown through the tinted glass. They had been at the others' house all afternoon, and he did not know if they were going home or somewhere else....

Only the Cinders of a Southern Sky.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Only the Cinders of a Southern Sky They say you should put all your old prayers in a red velvet bag All your burnt useless prayers All your prayers that are past their prime Prayers made of mud Prayers of old silos...

Midnight clear.(Short story)
January 1, 2007... WHAT MAKES THIS NIGHT DIFFERENT from all the rest?" Charles asks. His hair is slick with sleep as he follows me from room to room, a crumbling graham cracker in one sticky hand and a glass of chocolate milk in the other. He is five. His...

Farm Stories.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Farm Stories I roll this way and that in the great bed, under the quilt that mimics this country of broken farms and woods, the fatty sheath of the man melting off, the self-stabbing coil of bristles...

An encounter at nightfall.(Short story)
January 1, 2007... THOUGH ONLY A LITTLE AFTER DARK, the neighborhood was already deserted. No light spilled from the stone houses lining the street; with iron shutters bolted shut from the inside and doors locked, the buildings offered no hope of help. "So...

The girl most likely to succeed.(Short story)
January 1, 2007... THE LOUDSPEAKER HAS JUST ANNOUNCED that my flight to Madrid will be delayed for another six hours. All around me there are groans and curses, low, dark mutterings as people get up to query the attendant, to trek to Starbucks, to whip out their...

Lament.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Lament It does not end the way you plan, with dramatic flourish, firestorm of curses as you denounce church, deny belief in what was always central. It is not poetic, your taking leave of church and family;...

The Sign of a Carpenter.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... The Sign of a Carpenter The doors, oak. No, pine stained to oak. This neighborhood, commuter neighborhood, quick-build houses for the new middle class, people working the factory line at Michoud making the shuttle's...

Ode to Contractors Possessing Various Levels of Expertise.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Ode to Contractors Possessing Various Levels of Expertise This one's a shout out to the git-r-dones, the crowd since Katrina most idolized and sucked up to--seminude roofers, hard-hatters, electricians, tree doctors, ...

Mysterious Ways.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Mysterious Ways He actually said it--that, and Material things can be replaced. Loud as a stump grinder, twice he yelled from across the street before I made landfall and was out of the car to witness the...

How Okies look to natives.(Short story)
January 1, 2007... THE SUMMER BEFORE HE LEFT FOR COLLEGE Gib Harrell had been haunted by a fear too deep for reason. It was 1969, he was eighteen, and he felt stalked by something terrible and mortal, afraid he was going to die before he'd lived. Nothing he...

Editor's note.
January 1, 2007... With this special issue, Writing in the South, we offer the seventeenth number in an ongoing series dating back to volume 4, number 2, our spring 1968 issue. The choice to put together this new instance of a series nearly forty years on didn't...

Mist.(Short story)
January 1, 2007... LISA GUILLORY'S DREAMS ARE INDISTINCT and do not contain the images normally associated with nightmares. Nor do dawn and the early morning mist in the trees come to her in either the form of release or expectation. Instead, her dreams seem to...

Quilts of Gee's Bend.(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... The quilt face stretches across the bed, its features pieced together by one woman. Her vision alone determined that the red cloth streaks near the top, the green rises up the one side. Yet her pattern is imbued by the design traditions of...

The Borrowed Wife.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... The Borrowed Wife Before she came, & loving the pause between lovers as he did, he kept the apartment of his heart uncluttered & hung a permanent vacant sign between his eyes but couldn't help dreaming of fried chicken. ...

Tributary.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Tributary in memory of Malcolm Cowley In Savannah, the day you spoke at our college symposium, you were seventy-seven, the one exile left, your cheeks a blush of broken veins, tributaries found on a map of...

True confessions from a southern writers' love fest.
January 1, 2007... AROUND CHAPEL HILL, WHERE I TEACH, the community of southern writers is perceived as a kind of friendly literary mafia, meaning that the writers here are fond of doing favors for one another rather than breaking one another's arms....

Light at the End.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Light at the End in memoriam Cleanth Brooks A moment lost until I stumbled on Seamus's way of seeing things. He notes: "You drive into a meaning made of trees." "Is this the Holland Tunnel?" Cleanth asked....

The Absurd Probability of Resurrection.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... The Absurd Probability of Resurrection April. My grandfather's aged voice breezes through the phone into this warm room: We named him Lazarus because that little bull was as good as dead. Two tablespoons of corn syrup,...

Here or There.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Here or There And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain. --ANTON CHEKHOV, "The Student" Most brilliantly blue is the clear winter sky after I discover the apocalyptic visions of Daniel. Already I can...

A modified Jesus.(Short story)
January 1, 2007... 1963: We were poor; we didn't know it. Seward, now my husband, had a 1950 faded navy Dodge that he had sweated out of his very own tobacco patch at age eighteen. With money from his first tobacco crop, when he was only fourteen, he had bought...

Demographics.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Demographics My Texas town is filled with lean philosophers Who give the university the widest berth They can, and wisely so. They feel the straining earth Wheeze Sein und Zeit as day goes down, know work confers No...

The Great Speckled Bird.(Short story)
January 1, 2007... PRESTON CLEARWATER, PREMATURELY GRAY, squatted near a black 1950 Chrysler four-door sedan and, using a broken quart jar, dug a shallow hole where he buried part of the automobile's glove compartment contents and a billfold. Clearwater wore...

Ballad of the Chosen Sons.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Ballad of the Chosen Sons When the coyote calls, Cross to tomato fields in Georgia. Fly north with the ibis of change. San Juan de Chamula will sing. Vete al norte. Cry Nahuatl. Tomato worm. They always...

Weathervane Song.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Weathervane Song Fall of dahlias and swarming ladybugs. The level hangs on my wall. Bevels broken, one intact. Weathered and worn by moves. By changes in direction. By love. Even the cereus knows this love is...

South of lookout mountain.(Short story)
January 1, 2007... BADGER CATCHES CRUNCH THE LATEST of gravel sees a multicolored and Volkswagen van pull up to the porch. Careful not to show too much interest, she calls out, "The Gizmobus is here." After several relays of the news, feet pound down the main...

Crossed Over to Classic.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Crossed Over to Classic Though where immortals go, it ain't Always brother-brother, Now and then the late and great Groove on one another. At such a moment Homer cried, "Glory be--Hank Williams! Shake my...

History shaping selves: four poets.(Hoops)(Native Guard)(Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems, 1985-2005)(Sugartown)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... IN THE TITLE POEM of his late-in-life collection, History, Robert Lowell writes that "History has to live with what was here--/clutching and close to fumbling all we had." This famously visceral poet refuses to make history an abstraction; it...

Her pen froze.
January 1, 2007... IN DECEMBER 1959 Nelle Harper Lee accompanied her childhood friend Truman Capote to Garden City, Kansas, to help research the crowning achievement of Capote's literary career, In Cold Blood. As Bennett Miller's 2005 feature film Capote...

Reverberant music in After This.(Book review)
January 1, 2007... ALICE MCDERMOTT'S SIXTH NOVEL, After This, happens like life--a series of ordinary episodes that are imbued like dreams with symbol and seemingly trivial but telling detail. These matter-of-fact scenes are imprinted on the members of the Keane...

Great with Child.(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Great with Child by Beth Ann Fennelly. New York: W. W. Norton. $22.95 (cloth). The nineteenth-century paintings of Mary Cassatt, set in gardens and drawing rooms and seaside resorts, are recognizable for their portrayals of relationships...

Chicken Dreaming Corn.(The Celestial Jukebox)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Chicken Dreaming Corn by Roy Hoffman. Athens: University of Georgia Press. $24.95 (cloth)/$18.95 (paper). The Celestial Jukebox by Cynthia Shearer. Athens: University of Georgia Press. $18.95 (paper). "Go back where's you come from!"...

Green Squall.(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Green Squall by Jay Hopler, foreword by Louise Gluck. Volume 100 of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. $30.00 (cloth)/$16.00 (paper). Jay Hopler proves himself a consummate and daring master of...

The World Made Straight.(Book review)
January 1, 2007... The World Made Straight by Ron Rash. New York: Henry Holt. $24.00 (cloth)/$16.00 (paper, forthcoming, 2007 from Picador). A steel trap snapped on a teenage boy's leg, and "[t]he sun slid sideways and the ground tilted as well and slapped up...

Letter to the editor.(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... TRY AS I MAY, I CANNOT let pass unnoticed George, Core's gratuitous, sad, and silly criticism of the late Stanley W. Lindberg in "Lewis P. Simpson: The Critic as Editor" (The Southern Review, spring 2006). The world being rife with so many...