Blog: Essays, Reviews, & Other Southern Content
Six Degrees of Coca-Cola
Acid has burned the shape of a trident into the cement floor. A white etching on the gray warehouse floor. One leaky pallet of Coca-Cola products waiting for disposal. The smell is rancid. Gnats circle. As I am standing on the receiving dock at the Sam’s Club where I...
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Southern Ugliness Under Harsh Fluorescent Lights
Book review Nobody Knows How It Got This Good Amos Jasper Wright IV Livingston Press 2018, 312 pp., $8.95 Amos Jasper Wright’s Nobody Knows How It Got This Good is a collection of short stories woven together in an intricate but rough fashion, a vehicle to examine...
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Southern Lit Presents: Douglas Ray
Always Queer, Never Quiet Queer folks in the South generally don’t enjoy the limelight reserved for heterosexuals. When light is cast on the LGBTQ community, it’s generally around much-deserved human rights: whether members can exist safely in their identities in...
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Florida
Book review Florida Lauren Groff Riverhead Books 2018, 288 pp., $27 Lauren Groff’s outstanding new collection of stories, Florida, is so much more than “just” a story collection, and so much more than “just” about Florida. Rather, in ten dazzling stories and a...
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Wasting Away in Margaritaville Hell
Living and Retiring in ¾ Time In the early 1970s, Jimmy Buffet and Hilton Head Island, South Carolina were each stymied by identical situations. Buffet, a Gulf Coast native, was mired in an identity crisis. He definitely wasn’t rock ‘n’ roll, but with novelty songs...
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Let’s All Die Happy
Book review Let’s All Die Happy Erin Adair-Hodges University of Pittsburgh Press 2017, 112 pp., $15.95 The poems in Let’s All Die Happy by Erin Adair-Hodges are consistently and consciously aware of breath, and their process of breathing is often labored and the poems...
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