John Coltrane, April 1966 © Chuck Stewart Photography, LLC
Coming November 2018 . . .
The Oxford American’s 20th Annual
Southern Music Issue & CD
Featuring
NORTH CAROLINA
Reserve your copy today.
Come on and raise up.
Chuck Stewart’s photography provided by Fireball Entertainment Group, courtesy of Chuck Stewart Photographs of John Coltrane, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
A poem from the Fall 2018 issue.
of a copper-colored river
returns, prefers her wrists
cuffed
by swift currents
rather than caution-stilled
by the many sister-gazes.
A poem from the Fall 2018 issue.
A young couple scutters by
On a motorbike. Harley, I think.
On their way to the beach. I can
See his feet are bare, resting inches
From the muffler’s burning heat—oh
The recklessness of young men
That makes them so exciting
To fuck, and sends them off
To war, whistling and marching.
A poem from the Fall 2018 issue.
None of this surprises you now,
does it? I’m not sure I can know that,
I responded to myself.
Or I think I did.
I should have.
A friend told me to embrace
my disorientation here, to attend
to it and dwell in that state, make it
a daily practice, like walking,
like drinking coffee.
A poem from the Fall 2018 issue.
Working. The vacation
I need is on your mark,
Get set, go. It’s been years
Since I’ve seen the light
An installment of Chris Offutt’s Omnivore column, Cooking with Chris.
Big Bad Breakfast’s official slogan is “Lard have Mercy,” and I own one of their souvenir t-shirts. Recently I began to consider the words more carefully. Could it be sacrilegious? How does the Lord feel about lard? Would God be annoyed that his power of mercy is used to peddle apparel? No, I concluded. The phrase is intended as funny, and one thing is certain: God has a sense of humor. Otherwise, where did ours come from?
Sarah Winchester and the legacy of living with guns
It’s difficult to understate how the repeating rifle revolutionized killing, of both animals and man, as it brought the world from the single-shot muzzle-loaded rifle to a gun that could hold multiple cartridges and fire two shots per second. It’s the “gun that won the West.”
A featured short story from the Fall 2018 issue.
Our distant ancestor Harriett Moss made a living painting portraits of dead children. But before her career began in earnest, she sketched only cows. It was her husband, Thomas Moss, who painted from corpses, memorializing deceased sons and daughters for their families. People often said Thomas had the constitution for the work because he and Harriett had not been able to have children of their own. While Thomas traveled the countryside—following up with commissions, measuring cadavers that he would reanimate in two dimensions—Harriett was left alone at their farmhouse.
A feature essay from the Fall 2018 issue.
One morning in the summer of 1996, Damian Hart was standing naked on a pier in the Aegean Sea. The sun was bearing down on Mount Athos, one of several craggy peninsulas that extend like claws off the coast of northeastern Greece. Hart, an American priest, was a guest at Agiou Pavlou, or St. Paul, one of twenty-odd Greek Orthodox monasteries that occupy the land. For Greek Christians, the peninsula is a holy site, perhaps the holiest in the world.
A feature essay from the Fall 2018 issue.
I first devoured Robert Gipe’s books and plays because I wanted to understand Appalachia. I was searching for deeper insights than the victim-blaming bootstrap narrative espoused in J. D. Vance’s best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy—and where else but one of Gipe’s plays would you see convicted felons on a stage, acting right beside probation officers, teachers, and recovery coaches, all of them already bonded in their mutual need to talk about the hard problems around them?
A feature essay from the Fall 2018 issue.
Why was my great-great-grandfather always referred to as “Robert Singleton, the Civil War veteran who lost his leg at Murfreesboro, then went on to become Clerk of the County Court” rather than “Robert Singleton, whose life was saved, twice, by the black man his family had enslaved”? Moreover, what did all of this say about the America Papa so revered?
