The Southern Review

Photographed dioramas by artist Lori Nix adorn The Southern Review’s spring 2013 issue, now available for purchase online at http://thesouthernreview.org and in bookstores. 

The spring issue features new work by twenty-one poets, including translations of Ghalib by M. Shahid Alam and original poems by Carol Ann Davis, Anna Journey, David Bottoms, Corey Van Landingham, and Jake Adam York, to whom the issue is dedicated. Taken from York’s award-winning series on the civil rights movement, the three new poems in the issue represent some of York’s final work from this important project. In a poem entitled “Postscript” and dedicated to Medgar Evers, York writes, “. . . because you are nowhere / you are everywhere, / in the face of which I’d ask / how can I say anything, / in the face of which I ask / how can I say nothing at all?”

James Lee Burke brings us “Going across Jordan,” a tense page-turner about two men on the run and a corrupt Hollywood cowboy with an agenda of his own. Tamas Dobozy, whose last story featured in the The Southern Review was called ‘likely to become a classic’ by theWashington Post, returns to our pages with a piece about utopian dreams. Other fiction includes a story of unrequited love and a high school heavy-metal band by Chip Cheek; a fabulist tale about the mysterious appearance of stones in a village by Mika Seifert; and a short story about two young runaways in South Florida by Pushcart Prize–winning author Jaquira Díaz.

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s essay “Crimes against a Wrecker Driver” takes us behind the scenes at a salvage shop in a true-crime piece about violence and forgiveness. Kirk Curnutt’s “Once Again to Zelda” examines the role the influential biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda Fitzgerald has played in American culture.

Lori Nix’s dioramas depict the built environment devoid of people. Shopping malls, museums, libraries, and theaters in a state of ruin as nature encroaches are meticulously constructed and photographed, resulting in beautiful and eerie artifacts from an imagined future. Nix’s work has been shown in the Henry Art Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.