A poem from our 18th Southern Music Issue: Visions of the Blues. 

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. 

In the West Virginia of long ago, when it was a place with work that lured people, rather than spitting them out into the world, the Calabrians came to mine the coal, the Sicilians to lay the rails, the Abruzzese to chisel lovely stonework on the railroad tunnels and passes—you can still find that abandoned work in places, overgrown in ivy and filth, the names of its artisans lost to history.

A poem from the 18th Southern Music Issue: Visions of the Blues.

A poem from the 18th Southern Music Issue: Visions of the Blues.  

A poem from our 18th Southern Music Issue: Visions of the Blues.

A web feature showcasing excerpts from Village Prodigies, Rodney Jones’ new collection, to which the author refers as a “political satire, a harmony of narcissists, a fable, a reverb cartoon, a eulogy for a place that has vananished, and a children’s book for adults only.” Village Prodigies is published today by Mariner Books. 

The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded by Molly McCullly Brown is out today from Persea Books. 

Please join us in congratulating our colleague Rebecca Gayle Howell, whose new collection American Purgatory is a powerful book offering a hope in community that shares struggle and defiance.

Atget, Modotti, Weston, Stieglitz, Avedon, Karsh, Brassaï, Bresson, Ulmann. Jim would hand the books to me with no explanation, no bias of who was who and why and what the world already thought of the work. He told me only to put paper clips on the pages holding photographs that “found something in me.”