Appalachian Review

Moving Home

Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦

Poetry

Old men sing themselves to sunstroke in idling vans, their grown children inside buying out of season vegetables. We treat our youth like succulents on blistered windowsills, the memory of sustenance enough for us. We keep flattening the dust, the way a highway grinds the shade to pulp, a longitude…

Book Review: ‘Woman in Red Anorak’ by Marc Harshman

Emily Masters ♦

Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦

Book Reviews

Marc Harshman. Woman in Red Anorak. Amherst, Mass. and Seattle, Wa.: Lynx House Press/University of Washington Press, 2018. 70 pages. Sofcover. $17.95. In Woman in Red Anorak, Marc Harshman’s third full-length poetry collection, the poems span over disparate times and places, from a post-apocalyptic America to the Allied invasion of…

Storm Watch

Cheyenne Taylor ♦

Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦

Poetry

I have just enough of instinct left to know these signs of rain: an insect too routine for memory flits sideways; a squirrel reports his body’s arc into the greasy breeze between a low stone wall and a shade tree. The dish-pale sink of sky sucks out a lottery of…

A Bouquet

Jay Butler ♦

Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦

Poetry

Iris The calico’s eyes bloom blue-yellow in the window sill, alchemical gold. Sunflower Towering over wired archways, these guardians of hoop houses offer their bodies for butter, oil, lotion, birdfeed, or biodiesel. Poppy Armistice & remembrance, women who caught whiffs of independence in a San Franciscan back alley way. Morning…

Creation Myth

Clayton Spencer ♦

Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦

Poetry

After Ken Burns’s Country Music, episode one What if the world wasn’t spoken into existence but sung, chanted, passed down? Chicken one day, feathers the next. It must have been obnoxious, all that yodeling at the end of every sentence while Experience coated the ground. There was a time when…

The Faith of Withered Seeds

Clayton Spencer ♦

Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦

Poetry

I try and exit quick the body my lips move like moths at the center of the apple from the center of the orchard a blue diamond reflects my startled grin …

Editor’s Note

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦

Editor's Note

What is buried in the ground isn’t always what you think. It’s just the beginning.” With these evocative, mysterious words, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle begins to draw the reader into the world of Cowney, a nineteen-year-old Cherokee man who serves as the protagonist in her debut novel Even As We Breathe.…

Excerpt from ‘Hillbilly Hustle’, a novel by Wesley Browne

Wesley Browne ♦

Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦

Fiction

Knox Thompson first crossed paths with the man who would ruin him at a poker game above the arcade in downtown McKee, a forsaken place he had made it a point to avoid. After finding out about the game from one of his Porthos regulars, Knox couldn’t resist. It was…

Appalachian Heritage Essay Named Notable in Best American Essays

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Blog ♦

Best American Essays

Congratulations to Appalachian Heritage contributor Monic Ductan, whose essay “Fantasy Worlds” was named as Notable in Best American Essays 2019, edited by Rebecca Solnit (and series editor Robert Atwan). We also extend congratulations to Appalachian Heritage contributor Fenton Johnson, whose essay “The Future of Queer,” published in Harper’s Magazine, received…

Interview: Margaret Renkl

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Summer 2019 ♦

Interview

The shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love’s own twin,” Margaret Renkl writes in the opening pages of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, her memoir-in-micro-essays that was released earlier this year to glowing reviews.These wise, bracing words underpin the entire book, which…