A poem from the 18th Southern Music Issue: Visions of the Blues.
Once opened, the book immediately communicates to its reader what she needs to know: Olio is unlike any other book of poetry you have held.
A poem from the 18th Southern Music Issue: Visions of the Blues.
A poem from the Winter 2013 issue.
Veronica is lovely. She wipes the dust from Christ’s face in the carving
beside Simon, though she is never mentioned in the Gospels.
Although the journey of this book is more fraught than a cloud forest, it is more magical, too. The games we play become the way the poems tell their stories, the way they love and grieve. These games help reader and poet get to know each other, while also introducing other urgent relationships between country and self, mother and son, the living and the dead.
A poem from the South Carolina Music Issue.
I slipped into a clumsy dress
I built out of magnolia
leaves, strings and staples
so I could marry Thomas
in the backyard
back when we adorned
our heads with imaginary
crowns and called each
other queens
A poem from our 18th Southern Music Issue: Visions of the Blues.
A poem from the South Carolina Music Issue.
Clara Smith, Blues woman. They share
a room with no peephole, old gal,
young gal, they laugh and tell the boys
who want to stop by, they’s roommates.
Contemporary fiction writers can play hard for the joke, as if writing to a laugh-track, but Joy Williams’s humor is darker, subtler, more in line with the humor of Faulkner or Isaac Babel: bracing, unsettling.
A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.
My burnt body hangs crisscross over Carolina beach dunes below where
family gathers children’s ringing sand splash toys tangled in teenage lust
the skin consciousness potential of everyone eyeing one another
in sunbursted bottoms there is nothing here but the bliss of this day
& so I think on death hanging out over the Atlantic so many dead
