Kathryn Stripling Byer

Southern Fictions is a series of sonnets Byer wrote exploring her personal experience with racial conflict in the area of Southwest Georgia, where she grew up. There are six poems, each a snapshot, a memory, of a girl’s imperfect awareness of the simmering violence around her. . .

. . .The sonnets had been published years ago in a special edition of Callaloo, but this chapbook was something else entirely. The poems gave birth to it, one might say. Its very form is a physical expression of show more the words within.

The first line of the first sonnet goes “My father drapes his battle-flag across a back room window. If I tried to tell him why I wish he wouldn’t, I’d have hell to pay.” Richard Krawiec, the publisher of Jacar Press which spearheaded the project, David Wofford, the craftsman whose Horse and Buggy Press did the printing, and Ann Marie Kennedy, the paper artist that created the covers for the book, decided to take that line as literal inspiration. “All books feature a frontispiece image of a flag,” writes Wofford, “which is meant to imitate what a flag might look like after being up in a window for decades and faded by the sun.”

But there is something else. The thick, textured, dull red cover of handed-pulled sheets also evoke that first sonnet, because amongst cotton and flax fibers are the strands of cut up, pulped, old Confederate battle flags. “You are literally holding a repurposed flag in your hands while you read Kay’s poems,” says the printer. “I will admit it was nerve wracking looking at a 3 foot by 5 foot Confederate battle flag . . . but after getting over that it felt pretty good to take a rotary cutter and slice the thing up into pieces.” full column show less

Byer captures in her latest book the South I've known. I'll read this book over and over because of how it connects me with my farming family and how it reminds me of my childhood. That doesn't mean that every poem is full of light; the darkness of racism a reality as well as death that knocks on every door.

This book brought back memories of my own family full of harvest and family. The additional beauty of the book is that her view created several landscapes for me. One minute is as though she knows my farming grandpa. The next minute she describes a Cherokee woman's hair. The book is not long but it took me a week to read merely because I wanted to savor the poetry and the scenes created by an excellent poet.

I went from reading Byer's book to reading Rilke. Suddenly, I could hear Byer's voice speaking through Rilke. Perhaps Byer is the South's own Master of verse.