“Tell me about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.” —William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Rather than attempting to locate what the South is or “simply” to define the form, C.T. Salazar & Casie Dodd’s anthology, Mid/South Sonnets, prioritizes description and presence—sometimes defiant or joyful, resilient, but never stuck in neutral–instead. In his introduction, Salazar links the sonnet’s traditional volta, or turn, specifically to the notion of change: “What a sonnet does best is offer us a moment of transformation … we are navigating an unlocated present … where we can be changed and enact change ….” By choosing to use the sonnet and to reckon with the history of the North American South is also to be in conversation with the idea of form itself, its origins and current potential in defining space, both on the page and geographically.
People’s own origins may, of course, often determine their feelings about any geographical space. When we think of the North American South, however, we must move beyond merely terrestrial confines. We must pull the camera back for a larger view. Any region so ripe can be rocketing too quickly towards decay. In the collection’s first poem, “Carthage,” Stacey Balkun describes the aftermath of devastating change: “We are also rubble: empty citadels // with shuttered windows and welcome mats charred.” The myth of Southern hospitality has been sacrificed, its fecundity permanently destroyed, changed into “spirits sowing these fields with salt.”
If the South cannot be satisfactorily defined, what holds its inhabitants together? For some of these poems, the answer may be located in the kitchens and tables spanning and bridging towns, counties, states, and regions. Food represents an intimacy anyone can share. In order to understand the inherent differences between food as provider of nourishment and purveyor of sustenance, it is important first to recognize the role of eating as a sensual activity, one that involves acknowledgement and acceptance of the body’s biological need to ingest in order to stay alive and to function and to grow.
Food can be viewed through the lens of an intimate narrative, but in some cases with a darker outcome and desperate need for progress and change, even if it will bring ruin. Damien Uriah’s “Mush” uses food to create an aspirational image for the speaker: “Work means eating / frosted corn flakes for breakfast, like your father at his new house.” The volta, however, snaps the speaker back into the present. As he leaves for school, he sees what his father has built is rotting. The inherited form requires a terse narrative, and this hints also at what may come next.
In Ashley Jones’ poem recognizing Tyehimba Jess, “hoppinjohn: a blues,” food plays a connective role, providing necessary support and sustenance, as one might expect, and also participating in the narrative of change: “what alchemy where peas become pennies, / where even here we can be rich with pork.” In the second half of this double sonnet, salt appears again, but unlike in Balkun’s opening poem, salt is not the destroyer. Rather, it is celebrated for its capacity to give flavor to even the most humble of ingredients.
Food, however, is not the only binder in this anthology. The titles in this collection also do an incredible amount of work, as in “sonnet while ziptied in a police wagon, fulton county.” Aurille Marie’s context for the speaker becomes immediately clear as we are led through a brief tour of an even briefer moment in the life of someone may recognize in ourselves or our loved ones. Marie follows this harrowing meditation with a stunning deconstruction of form in “Unsonnet for the Poems So Black They Are Misread.” This poem breaks free of its form while also remembering it. What is the use of adhering to convention and form (or conventional form) when the world is falling apart, when the “center cannot hold?” The poem claims and is its own existence, as the final line asserts: “& that’s the poem.”
Cassandra Whitaker’s dazzling contribution, “What Claims Wolves Laid Upon My Body,” also claims its space, formally innovative in its construction. The subject matter, radical juxtaposition of subject matter with antiquated form, proving the validity and necessity for both. Salazar’s introduction and cataloguing of topics contained in this anthology, describes sixty six poets negotiating the pressures of what it means to exist and survive in the American South of today, while remembering its past, from the punishing climate changes to the Don’t Say Gay and Anti-Immigration bills, to the loss of reproductive rights and “the still-alive faucets of Jim Crow, whose pulse can be measured in the South’s incarceration statistics housing inequity, and every other nameable aspect of our daily social strata.”
The dedications and acknowledgements to other poets in some of these poems also create a sense of familiarity and camaraderie. What Ashley Jones’ poem achieves with food, Hannah Dow’s sonnet, “My Mother Tries to Teach Me about Language,” inspired by Natasha Tretheway, creates space with language as the vehicle capable of navigating memory’s treacherous terrain. Andrea Blancas Beltran’s sonnet, meant to be read forwards and backwards, also reaches into the past with its dedication to the poet’s great-great-grandfather, but also roots itself definitively in the present by acknowledging the work of Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon. The sonnets in this collection owe much to the past to the present, from Basho to Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Kim Addonizio.
For me, the most striking sonnet in the collection is a double set modeled after a crossword puzzle: Makalani Bandele’s “a little bit of blackitolism revisited” and “a little bit of blackitolism revisited with answers.” The second sonnet provides the solutions to the clues offered in the first. For instance, 7 across: “yo yo yo, where’s da homie dat beatbox,” to which the second poem clarifies: “rikersisland.” We can fill in the blanks, literally, although much of it has already been done for us. The future, however, is still waiting and in dire need of change. Together we must locate it, and language will be the first tool we use. It is, to answer Faulkner’s question, precisely why we all live.
Mid/South Sonnets, edited by C.T. Salazar & Casie Dodd. Fort Smith, Arkansas: Belle Point Press, August 2023. 112 pages. $19.95, paper.
Erica Bernheim teaches literature and writing at Florida Southern College, where she also directs the creative writing program and curates its Visiting Writers Series. Her creative and critical work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Kestrel, Bennington Review, DIAGRAM, and The Worcester Review.
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