We celebrated our twenty-fifth anniversary year by doing what we’ve always done: publish the groundbreaking fiction—three excerpts from Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award–winning novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing—essays, nonfiction, and poetry our readers have come to expect. Revisit or catch up on these highlights from 2017.
The Fall 2017 issue of the Oxford American is on newsstands nationwide today.
A Letter from the Editor, Fall 2017.
It is an ongoing project: reckoning with our past, making the South a better place to live and dream and learn and work.
A poem from the Fall 2017 issue.
I have tried to carry a persimmon home,
to share one fruit. I passed the tree running,
a pursuit which allows no pockets, no bags.
Needs no equipment. No team.
A poem from the Fall 2017 issue.
with the river to teach me
its long and winding vowels.
In exchange I taught it
swear words, how to play games.
A poem from the Fall 2017 issue.
in Indy than Virginia, fewer mountains,
less green for our eyes, and our cat
wasn’t born there, she was born here,
under the house, and if nothing
A poem from the Fall 2017 issue.
Always smoked so many seeds.
You will find yourself dragging
a live rabbit
by one foot, the other kicking.
A poem from the Fall 2017 issue.
sucking pinches of moss like
cough drops stuffing tiny pink
cheeks with breadcrumbs would
that make you love me more
An installment in Chris Offutt’s Omnivore column, Cooking with Chris.
Nothing is as powerful as the extraordinary jolt of a teenager’s first love. It’s like seeing the world after a double-cataract surgery. Life is suddenly exquisite. Each leaf becomes the bearer of unbearable beauty. Romeo and Juliet were so deliriously happy that they embraced murder and suicide as an ideal solution. I didn’t go that far, but I fell deeply and totally in love with Kim.
Traces of Cormac McCarthy’s Knoxville.
McCarthy’s books came to me as transformative things so often do: several-times borrowed. It was during my junior year of college, my first semester back home in Colorado after a failed track scholarship out of state. Up till then I’d read very little—I was concentrating on my running. But with that protective apparatus newly scrapped, I’d become freshly aware of a hulking nothingness where my intellectual interests should have been, and I set about catching up.
