Kathryn Stripling Byer

Southern Fictions is a series of sonnets Byer wrote exploring her personal experience with racial conflict in the area of Southwest Georgia, where she grew up. There are six poems, each a snapshot, a memory, of a girl’s imperfect awareness of the simmering violence around her. . .

. . .The sonnets had been published years ago in a special edition of Callaloo, but this chapbook was something else entirely. The poems gave birth to it, one might say. Its very form is a physical expression of the words within.

The first line of the first sonnet goes “My father drapes his battle-flag across a back room window. If I tried to tell him why I wish he wouldn’t, I’d have hell to pay.” Richard Krawiec, the publisher of Jacar Press which spearheaded the project, David Wofford, the craftsman whose Horse and Buggy Press did the printing, and Ann Marie Kennedy, the paper artist that created the covers for the book, decided to take that line as literal inspiration. “All books feature a frontispiece image of a flag,” writes Wofford, “which is meant to imitate what a flag might look like after being up in a window for decades and faded by the sun.”

But there is something else. The thick, textured, dull red cover of handed-pulled sheets also evoke that first sonnet, because amongst cotton and flax fibers are the strands of cut up, pulped, old Confederate battle flags. “You are literally holding a repurposed flag in your hands while you read Kay’s poems,” says the printer. “I will admit it was nerve wracking looking at a 3 foot by 5 foot Confederate battle flag . . . but after getting over that it felt pretty good to take a rotary cutter and slice the thing up into pieces.” full column… (mehr)