A poem from the Place Issue

Two hundred thousand miles away / in this ashen desolate terrain / you could almost forget our gun-smoked globe, / the wars raging like wildfire back home. 

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.

An interview with Ansel Elkins.

The Alabama landscape is so completely saturated in my soul that it’s hard to gain perspective of just how much it’s in these poems. Because the land is so rooted in my work, trying to answer that question would be like trying to unearth barehanded one of those old shacks that’s been swallowed whole by kudzu. I could never know myself without these red clay hills.