Poets can see into and beyond the surfaces of things: a slumber party, the fraught present, a forest. South Carolina’s Ray McManus shows how it’s done.

Veteran South Carolina poet Ray McManus, the winner of the 2023 Governor’s Award for the Arts, writes beautifully about rural life—from boar hogs to pickup trucks to the hunger that won’t go away.

Ray McManus, a South Carolina-based writer of poetry and prose, today graces Salvation South with seven — count ’em, seven! — new poems.