Tag: Southern Poetry

Poetry Soundbite: A Reading and Interview with Kory Wells

Posted on by Chase Dimock

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Welcome to AIOTB Magazine’s third Poetry Soundbite, an on-going series of poetry readings and interviews. For this edition, we welcome Kory Wells, the author of Sugar Fix, poetry from Terrapin Books. A former software developer now focused on her longtime side gig in creative writing, Kory nurtures connection and community through her advocacy for the arts, democracy, afternoon naps, and other good causes. A recent two-term poet laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, she is founder and manager of a reading and open mic series and a mentor with the low-residency program MTSU Write. Kory’s poetry has been featured on The Slowdown podcast by former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, and her writing appears in James Dickey Review, Ruminate, Stirring, The Southern Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere. korywells.com

 

Below the video, you can find links to some of the poems on AIOTB Magazine

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The Assistant Marshal Makes an Error in Judgement

When the Watched Pot Boils

Untold Story

Chase Dimock: A Review of Sugar Fix By Kory Wells

Posted on by Chase Dimock

 

A Review of Kory Wells’ Sugar Fix

By Chase Dimock

 

       When Kory Wells sent a submission of poetry to As It Ought To Be Magazine last Spring, I was first struck by her sense of history. In “The Assistant Marshal Makes an Error in Judgement”, Wells writes about a census taker in the 19th century whose guesses at the races of citizens become their legal racial identity inscribed in his government ledger. Today in 2020, it took a court battle to resolve the citizenship question on this year’s census. This poem is more than just a historical footnote; its reminder of how the politics of identity and who has the right to recognize it have continually defined American society. In this way, Wells follows the words of fellow southern writer William Faulkner, who famously wrote (and was even more famously quoted by President Obama) “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

       With Sugar Fix, Wells explores the never dead past of today through the personal and cultural memories of sugar. Recipes handed down from generations are clues to her family mythologies, the proustian taste of chocolate ice cream on her tongue is a confessional, the trade in sugar and sweets in the south is a material history of the racial and class tensions of reconstruction to today. It would be easy for a book of poetry centered on the metaphor of sugar to lapse into saccharine sentimentality and syrupy cutesiness, but Wells is a poet who understands the cost of pleasure and the sweat demanded of our brow before we taste the sweet. She knows the personal price of indulgence and the social cost of supplying society with its sugar fix.

       In “Still Won’t Marry” Wells takes on the persona from the traditional Appalachian song “Angeline the Baker,” envisioning her as weary of the constant propositions of trading sugar for skin:

He says a little taste of sugar will cure
my weary back, my aching shoulders, my
singed arms. Like I don’t know what that man wants.

Angeline’s side of the story is wise to the after effects of the sugar fix “The bed a pleasure too short. Babies Chores./ His wants ahead of mine.” Wells connects this folklore of indulgence in sugar and flesh to her own past in a poem whose title conveniently saves me from having to summarize its premise: “He drove a four-door Chevy, nothing sexy, but I’d been thinking of his mouth for weeks.” During a date at a Dairy Queen Drive in, Wells is fixated: Continue reading “Chase Dimock: A Review of Sugar Fix By Kory Wells” →

“Standard Time” By Stephen Roger Powers

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

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Standard Time

The highway to work was longer than usual
the first Monday after turning back the clocks.

My watch suggested I slow down.
You are not late enough, it said. Daydream some more.

Hood up, hands in his pockets, a boy waited
at the end of a driveway by a mailbox.

His jowly fawn boxer sat in charge
of watching the other direction for the school

bus, its muzzle and underbelly
white as a fence post.

My super vision cut a hole, like a glass on biscuit
dough, in the boy’s bag sagging at his feet.

His math homework wore a corsage
of purple jelly

thumb prints above the first story problem.
If you are traveling fifty miles per hour,

my watch said, and work is fourteen miles away
racing toward you a hundred kilometers per hour,

when and where will the train derail?
How long does it take the bullet to exit the barrel?

My eyes met the boy’s through the windshield
as I passed. He yawned contagiously.

The boxer’s little docked tail
bustled up leaves that matched its coat.

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About the Author: Stephen Roger Powers started writing poetry almost twenty years ago to pass time in the middle of the night when he was too energized to sleep after coming off the stage in comedy clubs around the Midwest. He is the author of The Follower’s Tale and Hello, Stephen, both published by Salmon Poetry. Other work has appeared in 32 Poems, Shenandoah, The Southern Poetry Anthology Volume V: Georgia, Rabbit Ears: TV Poems, and Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems. He hasn’t done stand-up in a long time, but every once in a while he finds avenues for the performer he was born to be. He was an extra in Joyful Noise with Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton, and he can be seen if you know just where to look.