Foreword
SONGS OF FREEDOM
"Bound for Canaan Land"
"Nobody Knows de Trouble I’ve Had"
"The Good Old Way"
"Go to Sleep"
LOOKOUTS
Hart Crane, "Southern Cross"
Langston Hughes, "The South"
Rita Dove, "Reverie in Open Air"
Natasha Trethewey, "Pastoral"
TAR HEEL AND PALMETTO
Francis Scott Key, "Defence of Fort McHenry"
A. R. Ammons, "Easter Morning"
Lucille Clifton, "at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989"
Kathryn Stripling Byer, "Night Fishing"
Atsuro Riley, "Diorama"
CRITTERS
Sidney Lanier, "The Mocking Bird"
Madison Cawein, "The Whippoorwill"
Donald Justice, "Southern Gothic"
James Dickey, "The Heaven of Animals"
Henry Taylor, "Riding Lesson"
Michael Collier, "Turkey Vultures"
William Logan, "Zero Hour"
Natasha Trethewey, "Flounder"
VOLUNTEERS AND BLUEGRASS
Francis Orray Ticknor, "Little Giffen"
Nikki Giovanni, "Knoxville, Tennessee"
James Seay, "Audubon Drive, Memphis"
Maurice Manning, "Sad and Alone"
Bobby C. Roger, "Jerry Lee Lewis Plays 'That Lucky Old Sun' at Bad Bob’s Vapors Club, Memphis, Tennessee"
WARTIME
Herman Melville, "Shiloh"
Henry Timrod, "Charleston"
Margaret Junkin Preston, “Under the Shade of the Trees”
James Dickey, "Hunting Civil War Relics at Nimblewill Creek"
Charles Wright, "My Own Little Civil War"
Natasha Trethewey, "Elegy for the Native Guards"
BAYOUS AND THE LONE STAR
Walt Whitman, "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing"
Dave Smith, "Drycleaners"
W. S. Di Piero, "Fat Tuesday"
Naomi Shihab Nye, "Going for Peaches, Fredericksburg, Texas"
Ai, "The Singers"
Sandra Cisneros, "You Bring Out the Mexican in Me"
Ray Gonzalez, "Rattlesnakes Hammered on the Wall"
Andrei Codrescu, "Virgin Mule"
Yusef Komunyakaa, "Immolatus"
Adam Zagajewski, "Houston, 6 p.m."
David Biespiel, "To Sylvester from Terminal B"
Greg Glazner, The Animal Intelligences"
Kevin Young, "Ode to Boudin"
Henry Hughes, "Since the City Turned Blue"
A CLOUD OF WITNESSES
Sidney Lanier, "A Ballad of Trees and the Master"
Paul Laurence Dunbar, "Sympathy"
Edgar Allan Poe, "Sonnet: To Silence"
Robert Penn Warren, "Founding Fathers, Nineteenth-Century Style, Southeast U.S.A."
Wendell Berry, "Manifestor: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front"
Etheridge Knight, "The Warden Said to Me the Other Day"
Sonia Sanchez, "I Have Walked a Long Time"
C. D. Wright, "Remarks on Color"
YELLOWHAMMER, MAGNOLIA, AND THE NATURAL STATE
Langston Hughes, "Birmingham Sunday"
Etheridge Knight, "The Idea of Ancestry"
Andrew Hudgins, "Julia Tutwiler State Prison for Women"
Rodney Jones, "Sweep"
C. D. Wright, "The Ozark Odes"
Fleda Brown, "The Farthest North Southern Town"
Frank Stanford, "The Gospel Bird"
Stanley Plumly, "Four Hundred Mourners"
Natasha Trethewey, "Providence"
Geoffrey Brock, "Trip Hop"
Honoree Jeffers, "Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and Her Cousin
Lady Elizabeth Murray, c. 1779"
BEAUS AND BELLES
Langston Hughes, "Song for a Dark Girl"
John Crowe Ransom, "Piazza Piece"
Eleanor Ross Taylor, "Pause, In Flight"
David Huddle, "Burned Man"
C. D. Wright, "Everything Good Between Men and Women"
MOUNTAINS AND THE OLD DOMINION
Muriel Rukeyser, "The Soul and Body of John Brown"
Charles Wright, "A Short History of the Shadow"
Gregory Orr, "Virginia Backyard: July"
Bob Hicok, "In the Loop"
Maggie Anderson, "Sonnet for Her Labor"
David Huddle, "Roanoke Pastorale"
Wendy Willis, "More Notes on the Theory of American Degeneracy"
SUNSHINE AND PEACHES
Walt Whitman, "Orange Buds by Mail from Florida"
Wallace Stevens, "The Idea of Order at Key West"
Jan Toomer, "Georgia Dusk"
Amy Clampitt, "Discovery"
Elizabeth Bishop, "Florida"
David Bottoms, "Under the Vulture Tree"
Debora Greger, "My First Mermaid"
Campbell McGrath, "Shopping for Pomegranates at Wal-mart on New Year’s Day"
Joe Bolton, "Tropical Courtyard"
DESTINATIONS AND TENDER MERCIES
Mary McNeil Fenollosa, "The Magnolia"
Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"
Donald Justice, "The Small White Churches of the Small White Towns"
Tino Villanueva, "Haciendo Apenas la Recoleccion"
Phillis Levin, "Elegy for a Magnolia"
Christian Wiman, "Rhymes for a Watertower"
Peter Campion, "Danielle"
Terrance Hayes, "The Blue Terrance"
