This week for Eyes on the South, we're visiting the work of Kentucky expatriate Carey Gough. Gough uses this photography project as "a lifeline—a way of accessing home from afar. The tension between the realities captured on film and the mythical Kentucky that can only exist in song lyrics imbues these photographs with a sense of loss and impermanence."
Louisiana's coastline is shrinking, rapidly. As Anne Gisleson reports, "the United States Geological Survey claims oil and gas companies are responsible for roughly a third of the state’s wetlands degradation." To try and claim reparations for this destruction, writer John Barry recently led the people of Louisiana through a lawsuit that aimed to make these companies "comply with the contracts and permits they themselves signed." This is John Barry's story—his work to save Louisiana.
I had less than a minute, and King was tired. He had no need to be messing around with someone like me, there was nothing I could give him, but he was gracious and I was grateful for the chance to shake his hand.
The history of the South is the South. And history is always with us—as present as you are, reading these words. As present as I mean to be as I type them. My South made me, in spite of itself.
An installment in our ongoing series, Poetry in Place, a symposium for Southern poets to consider the question, "What does it mean to be a poet of the 'New' South?"
I was not born in the South but I've known the spirit of inequality all my life.
Digging through this hard clay, I dig through history. I take the blood-red clay of my native land and shape it with my own hands. This raw red earth symbolizes violence and vitality.
"More often, the events allude to a specific reminiscence from my childhood. A car-sized drainage ditch runs parallel to Cherokee Avenue in Columbus, Georgia, and I remember more than once, an automobile would carry its driver tumbling down into the concrete pit."
A poem from the summer 2014 issue.
Peace on this planet
Or guns glowing hot,
We lay there together
As if we were getting
Something done. It
Felt like planting
A garden or planning
A meal for a people
Who still need feeding,
A poem from the summer 2014 issue.
When the sky threw down hail, I knew
our world was sudden, changing. In the violence of rains
we ran, I held my daughter with her water-soaked braids.
She covered her ears and counted
one Mississippi, two Mississippi
the space between lightning and thunder.
A poem from the summer 2014 issue.
Something is burning in the Iowa hills.
As we move down the pewter river,
color of our ashen skin, we see smoke,
