Weekend Revival

Weekend Revival is a book of voices. They belong to a small Southern town - the postmistress, the reverend, the gravekeeper, the dead - and they do not always announce when they've shifted. The poems move between sermon and folk ballad, elegy and field report, lyric and something harder to name. Water runs through all of it: the dried-up well, the toxic river, the flood Sadie wishes for when a stranger walks in looking like her dead son. Lightning strikes a man while he clears his own trees. A wren flies into a window, breathes, and then gets up again.

This is poetry rooted in Appalachian folklore and small-town Southern ritual - the hog roast after the sermon, the graveyard behind the church, the bees that keep someone's grief company. There is genuine faith here, and genuine menace, and sometimes they are indistinguishable. The uncanny arrives without ceremony: mud raising bodies, the dead woman whispering through the cave, the smell that won't wash off your hands.

Weekend Revival was first published in 2019. This edition returns to the work with revised poems and the conviction that these voices - stubbornly local, quietly strange - still have something left to say.