Vinegar and Char

For more than three decades, my mother has served black-eyed peas for breakfast on New Year’s Day.

The poems in Vinegar and Char reveal the ways the South may be morphing into something new but also provide windows into spaces where we can take refuge in its deep and complicated past.

The South is still a region of its own, but it is changing and evolving from the land that the Agrarians once knew, and that change is a source of its strength.

Each poet approaches the concept of what one might call Southernness with a great deal of versatility.

Southern poetry can’t be placed in a tidy box, since it is as varied as the writers themselves.

These poems captured my attention because they redefine poetry about the South as well as what we categorize as Southern poetry.

settled on writing an essay on the difficulties facing the modern South, which also issued a stinging critique of the Agrarians

when I served as editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review,

Trethewey returned as U.S. poet laureate to pay homage to York.

region’s finest writers have delivered big truths in small bundles.