Three recent poetry collections — Lou Turner’s Twin Lead Lines, Connie Jordan Green’s Nameless as the Minnows, and Richard Collins’ Stone Nest — skillfully utilize a variety of Tennessee settings, including the Nashville music world, Oak Ridge in its early years, and a rocky mountaintop in Sewanee.
In his third collection, Feller, East Tennessee poet Denton Loving offers moments of heightened exchange between the human and nonhuman worlds.
The poems in Derelict Days in That Derelict Town, the fourth collection by Knoxvillian Alan May, embrace gilded weirdness and delicious decrepitude, but their staying power lies in their depiction of human loneliness.
In the wake of the 2024 presidential election, celebrated writers Saeed Jones and Maggie Smith attempted what so many of us have struggled to do: process events that have unleashed an onslaught of dangers. As a response, Jones and Smith have assembled The People’s Project, which they describe as “a community in book form.”
Denton Loving is the author of Crimes Against Birds (2014) and Tamp (2024), which received the inaugural Tennessee Book Award for Poetry. Loving will appear at the 2025 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 18–19.
Connie Jordan Green, a member of the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame, is the author of novels for young people, poetry chapbooks and collections, and a personal newspaper column that ran for more than 42 years. She will appear at the 2025 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 18–19.
