Sarah Messer Q&A discusses poetic form
Sarah Messer, author of Red House (Viking, 2004) and Bandit Letters (New Issues, 2001), discusses poetic form.
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Sarah Messer Q&A on the first poem she ever wrote
Sarah Messer, author of Red House (Viking, 2004) and Bandit Letters (New Issues, 2001), talks about the first poem she ever wrote.
Sarah Messer Q&A on how she became interested in poetry
Sarah Messer, author of Red House (Viking, 2004) and Bandit Letters (New Issues, 2001), on how she became interested in poetry.
When I was four, we drove to Nashville
When I was four, we drove to Nashville, Grand Ole Opry-bound, and stopped the night at a broken down motel in Tennessee—shag walls, mossy carpet, dank concrete— and I remember standing in the doorway as evening fell, a busful of believers rattling their way to the pool for a makeshift baptism, the Amens and Hear […]
Down South, all it takes to be a church
Down South, all it takes to be a church are some stencils and a van. And my childhood was full of them: The Episcopal litanies of Sunday school exercises in genuflection, the low country Southern Baptist pit of hellfire and damnation hemming us inside the tent while just outside, flies buzzed above plattered […]
Kristan clogged to Rocky Top
Kristan clogged to Rocky Top at her wedding, didn’t want her baby born a Yankee so took a slow train south in the dusk of her ninth month: Virginia born in the squalling drawl of Mama. I left my accent in a gas station in Kansas on the move out west. Too much time […]
Sherman’s march snaked through the South
Sherman’s march snaked through the South with the alliteration he felt entitled to, ku klux clinging like a kudzu curse, like the carpetbaggers soon to come. Laying over in Savannah, his commanders slept in courtyard houses on the cobbled streets (with the silver hidden just out of view) while the infantry camped in a […]
If you would or could not do/for yourself
If you would or could not do for yourself, you hired a nanny or wet nurse: cateyed Gaither rolling in each day to take up my bundled being and soothe me in sustenance. She raised me: balling my fists to teach me to fight, shaming my hips loose so I could shimmy, count cards, […]