Southern Review of Books

Location, location, location! Rathburn’s Broken Houses opens with the speaker’s parents, in a poem titled “Loved Houses,” window-shopping houses they can’t afford. The title may as well read “Loved Homes” as we see the cottage, the South Beach studio, t...

In an interview included in the soon-to-be-released documentary on great American poet Mary Oliver, Saved by the Beauty of the World, Oliver shares that she is “most worried about […] a most serious, ongoing devastation of the Earth, which...

The disappearance of a loved one is often a sudden, unexpected event, but surviving the disappearance can be a slow, agonizing process, an erasure of oneself as well as the vanished. Katherine Conner’s The Hanged Man, a collection of short stories, depi...

Following Justin Wymer’s debut collection Deed, published in 2019, Let the Forest Go: Poems is “a memoir in poetic fragments,” an edited transcription of the intimate diaries the author kept during his time abroad from 2015 to 2017. In the Span...

I was reading Salvation South when I first came across the work of Spencer K.M. Brown. This was back in January of 2025, and the story was “I’m Bound to Leave This Dark Behind.” Immediately, I was hooked. Brown’s story fea...