“I do not control or bend the national destiny; it controls and bends me,” Benito Mussolini told Edward Price Bell in an interview in 1924. Bell was the Chicago Daily... Read More

Throughout his collection of poems "From Whence", Chitwood seems bent on disproving fellow Southern poet Allen Tate who once wrote, “The typical southern conversation is not... Read More

The “afflicted girls” are the accusers in the Salem Witch trials. Elizabeth Parris, Abigail Williams, Ann Putnam, and Mary Warren speak again in the author’s second book... Read More

Poetry has been around longer than history, so it’s difficult to find, or even imagine, a new theme for this old impulse. In every book of poetry by a single author, the... Read More

Writers spend long hours alone. Because the act of writing is usually done in isolation, there remains a mystery about the process. An aspiring athlete can go to a game and... Read More

Southern writers have never had a monopoly on mental distress or journeys to the dark side, but they certainly have the pedigree. Southern literature of all types has long... Read More

In the early winter of 1863, a young Union soldier in a letter home mentioned a comrade who had taken ill: “The other night the Corporal had a baby, for the Corporal turned... Read More

Having read this book, acclaimed poet and university lecturer David R. Slavitt calls the author “one of the best dozen or so poets writing in America. Here, she not only... Read More

Is it possible that a poet writes in order to perplex a reader? To ask questions, or tell stories, without necessarily sorting it out for him or herself? It seems that this... Read More

“Sometime we skirted along the brow of a precipice where one might look down a sheer thousand feet into a sea of foliage of variegated hues, and anon we plunged into the... Read More

In this poetic memoir, the author seeks to find the source of her daughter’s mental illness through the vehicle of lineage. Writing through three generations of family... Read More

The necessary kindling is what ignites, and in the title poem it begins this way: “when she awakens, / she remembers / the shape of her own breath, / pressing it / into the... Read More