What seems lost can be found in a bowl of golden fruit, offered in the year’s deepest dark
On Christmas Eve, I stand at the sink, pry open baseball navels, the perfect world of orange: heady zest to the nose, the bitter pith, my thumbs’ push, push to separate flesh from thick rind, not unlike pushing from the old year to the new, birthing the long hidden into daylight.
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On not letting inconvenient truths taint intoxicating moments
It’s hard to believe the whole of the world isn’t simply the sum of all the little worlds that look exactly like your own.
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Book Excerpt: New Red Words
Larry D. Thacker’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Poetry South, Appalachian Journal, Still: The Journal, and Pikeville Review, among other publications. His 2021 story collection, Working It Off in Labor County, was published by West Virginia University Press. He lives in Johnson City, Tennessee.
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FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Bill Brown, a native of Dyersburg, Tennessee, was the author of many poetry collections, including Late Winter, The News Inside, and The Cairns. Brown also spent much of his life nurturing the work of other writers, chiefly during his years as a teacher at Nashville’s Hume-Fogg High School. He died on December 17, 2023.
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Annette Sisson’s new poetry collection reminds us that we are living and dying at once
In her latest poetry collection Winter Sharp with Apples, Annette Sisson considers the ordinary but important moments that bind people together. Sisson will appear at The Nocturne Reading Series at Land of a Thousand Hills in Nashville on January 21.
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Book Excerpt: Florence
Bess Cooley is a winner of The Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, and her work has also appeared in Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, and Verse Daily, among other publications. She is the co-founding editor of Peatsmoke Journal and teaches at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
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