Southern Comfort

In this collection of linked poems, Andrews describes a childhood during the Vietnam War era on a farm in a divided household with a southern father and northern mother. The memories and trials of childhood come from a fabled place where whiskey and story were shared by children, and superstitions and mythmaking were a way of life.

Nin Andrews grew up on a farm in Charlottesville, Virginia. She received her BA from Hamilton College and her MFA from Vermont College. Her poems and stories have a appeared in my literary journals and anthologies including Agni, Ploughshares, and Best American Poetry. The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council grants, she is the author of many books including Miss August (CavanKerry Press 2017), The Book of Orgasms, Southern Comfort (CavanKerry Press 2009), and Why God Is a Woman.

Cleanliness is next to godliness
Grandma always said.
Most days she met me at the screen door
with a feather duster
or our new Electrolux vacuum,
the hose sucking my blouse.
She said she liked her girls clean.
She said I was coated
with dog hairs, horse hairs,
and God only knows what all else.
Fixing me like a flower bouquet,
tucking in my blouse, fluffing my bangs
and adjusting my barrettes,
she’d stare me down just to let me know
I was allowed in only if she said so.

Like snapshots pasted in the family album, these deceptively straightforward poems accrue a truly unsettling resonance in the aggregate. Southern Comfort reads like a poetic memoir doled out anecdote by anecdote, each one tinged with an awareness of the unspoken just under the surface—the underlying ambivalence, shame and desperation common to too many of our childhoods. Long-time fans of Andrews’ daring and inventive poetry will discover a different side to her aesthetic in this thoroughly compelling and moving book.
— Mark Cox

Southern Comfort has all the essential ingredients of a good southern tale: grandmas, biscuits, snakes, stringed instruments, a boy named Jimmy, ghosts, and the Lord. Nin Andrews turns her strange and wickedly accurate imagination on these predictable details and alchemizes them into a poetry of mythic proportions. Here, larger than life men and women, a “delusional” rooster named No Doze, an assortment of insects, and Elvis himself speak the language of metaphor and the gospel. “Sometimes he says/ behind every tale there’s another tale./ That’s the one he wants to tell.” That’s the one, or the several, Nin Andrews tells also in this deeply funny, deeply intelligent, truly southern book.
— Maggie Anderson

October 2009
84 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
978-1-933880-14-3