“Etheree for Heather Heyer” Out in Poetry South

Unattended pushcart advertising “frankfurts” with sauerkraut or onions, ice-cold soft drinks, and pies for 5 cents on a rain-soaked wharf.

I was pleased to receive a wonderful holiday package in the mail today: four copies of Poetry South, with my Pushcart-nominated “Etheree for Heather Heyer” among many other works I am looking forward to reading.

In the interim between my nomination and the arrival of the journal, I have been reading poems from 2017 that are published at Poetry South’s website. They couple a dreamy, lyrical sensibility with a sense of the urgent and ominous in a way that seems at once traditionally Southern and reflective of our current fraught moment in history. Although I was born and raised in the North, my mother was originally Southern, and I seem to have, perhaps through her, a taste for lyricism and a sense of tragedy that fit with strong themes running through Southern literature, from Faulkner through Tennessee Williams, and again, in different form, in Poetry South. However I acquired these, I am happy that my poem partakes of them and is out in strong, distinctive company.

Photo credit: Office for Emergency Management. Office of War Information. Overseas Operations Branch. New York Office. News and Features Bureau. Picture Division. Exhibit Section. (1942 – 1945). Unattended pushcart advertising “frankfurts” with sauerkraut or onions, ice-cold soft drinks, and pies for 5 cents on a rain-soaked wharf. Ca. 1939.  PD. Wikimedia Commons.