Essays

“I’m just a piece of trash from the gutter,” Jesse told me with pride. “I was born to be what I am. I come from a family of hustlers. Most people at family reunions. They talk about their kids and who got married and shit. At my family...

We confused the American Dream with simple accumulation. We spent vastly beyond our means in an attempt to give off a false impression of achievement, and that wild spending of borrowed money drove the current crash.

His writing is devastating in its beauty, evoking West Virginia’s mountain hollows with a sinewy and precise prose that comes as close to Hemingway as anything I’ve ever read.

Here is North Gulfport—
its liquor stores and car washes,

The house is in need of repair, but is—
for now, she says—still hers. After the storm,
she laid hands on what she could reclaim:

Somewhere in the post-Katrina wreckage and disarray of my grandmother’s house, there is a photograph of my brother Joe and me, our arms around each other’s shoulders. We are at a long-gone nightclub in Gulfport, the Terrace Lounge, standing...

On Saturday, when I come to see
my brother, they call him, over loudspeaker,
to the tower—a small guardroom

The water clock makes into a measure
a flow so continuous none can say

I wanted to say I have come home
to bear witness, to read the sign
emblazoned on the church marquee—

We’re at the Potts Mountain Shooting Range
on a hot day in March, blowing ammo,