How do you answer poverty, doubt, and worries about your kids? With the scent of sweet briar, the realness of animals, and a bridge in the dark.

Appalachian men and women: their weathered hands, the horseshoes over their doors, and the angels that watch over them.

A poet from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina on landscape, family, and how we’re obligated to both.

Two lifelong friends—one a poet, one a painter–talk about it all: labor, joy, and love; the value of slowness; the subtleties of structure; and how to “make it soft, make it low.”

Alabama Poet Laureate Ashley M. Jones creates entire worlds in three new poems and affirms the power of poetry to help us see others and ourselves.

Three dazzling new poems by Mississippian C.T. Salazar, and an interview on binaries, ecologies, and the mysteries of time.

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.

Junious “Jay” Ward, Charlotte’s inaugural Poet Laureate, serves up three new poems and talks about how his new post lets him “take the church to the people.”

Cumberland Gap poet Denton Loving talks about changes in Appalachian culture and offers four new poems that apply the wisdom of nature to the human predicament.

From Washington, D.C., three poems honoring ancestry and excavating history.

Let’s not get so cultured we’re blind, folks.

Four new poems by—and an in-depth conversation with—Kentucky’s Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.