On returning home from our summer holiday last night, I was pleased to find in the mail pile my contributor copies of Poems of the American South (Knopf), edited by David Biespiel. A beautiful book, it draws from several centuries and is shaped by an admirably catholic notion of what constitutes Southern poetry. The fact that the editor chose to include my poem “Trip Hop” rather than one of my more explicitly Southern poems is perhaps indicative of the volume’s fresh take on its subject. Read more ...

I’m very pleased to have a poem of mine—a ten-part sequence called “Staring Back at Us”—included in Lines in Long Array, a gorgeous anthology commemorating the sesquicentennial of the Civll War. Beautifully conceived by editors David Ward and Frank Goodyear and exquisitely illustrated with Sally Mann photographs, it was published by Smithsonian Books and launched in November at the National Portrait Gallery. Read more ...