My Mississippi is a personal homage to a family history set in the Deep South. As with any family, there are stories, myths, and lullabies. These poems weave a complex backdrop to the flat and unforgiving dominion of the Delta. The land is both harsh and magical, a rural setting of bayous and blackberry thickets, and a vast horizon scored with distant latitudes and longitudes of pasture fences. Here, life is steeped slowly and spooned from a map of truths passed on like treasured recipe cards. There is hardship, triumph, and longing. Threading it is all like a collective vein, is the river. It’s what we know. It’s where we will return.
Anchored in the “mud-womb” of Mississippi, its bayous, rivers and lands, My Mississippi is an intensely female chronicle of a Southern family. Spanning generations, these poems are flooded with past— the plantation, Southern Belles, slaves, and war-ravaged land— but invigorated with the moving on, rebuilding and reshaping of love to envelop present-day descendants. Drawing from ancestral diaries, oral histories, memory and a rich imagination, these tightly- crafted poems are as rhythmic as the call of cicadas and as melodic as the river itself. A much-needed female voice that is plush as cotton bolls, but never sentimental, Laura Sobbott Ross renders a remarkable homage to family and the South. My Mississippi is a gorgeous book that deserves to be widely read.
— Gianna Russo, author of Moonflower
To read these rich, compelling poems is to step into the current of a wide and powerful river, one that sings “with a well-spring mouth.” In them, we discover that the past— time, generations, land—isn’t lost or left behind, but is the very current pulling at our ankles, all around us, urging us on. These poems are as alive as running water, deep as old roots, and familiar as close kin. My Mississippi is a genuine, enchanting achievement.
— LeighAnna Schesser, author of Heartland
Laura Sobbott Ross writes like an angel. The poems in her new chapbook, My Mississippi, resurrect a past at once gone and continually present, a past of place and people rendered in a carnival of imagery thick as biscuits and gravy, a catalogue of bone deep feeling just there behind the brilliant panes of memory: “Barometer/ of sweet gum and paw paw leaves lifting/ suddenly to share their understory.” If you don’t know Mississippi, this book will make you homesick for a place you’ve never been. For exiles like me, its old home week.
— John Calvin Hughes, author of The Shape of our Luck
Mother said girls shouldn’t whistle.
Was it the shape the lips took
beyond the dull hum of duty—
where we snapped the beans,
swept the feathers from the stoop,
unpinned laundry still humid on the line.
At the kitchen window after supper,
wrist-deep in suds and cast iron,
we’d dream words like comely
or promenade or swizzle stick whispered
at our reflections— dim and solicitous
against a field freshly turned of stars.
Wasn’t everything a field,
something waiting to be hemmed
and mended, or else a spell for rain—
blue interlocking blue in every hexagon
of chicken wire, the pecans falling
eggshell thin against a hard roof.
Mother said pretty is as pretty does,
and so we sat without fidgeting
in our hand sewn hand-me-downs
through gnats and braids and hymnals,
till we could ride the horses, or weave
the john boat through the cypress trees,
trailing a ribbon of clear sky in the duckweed.
Unlike the girls whose fathers owned
the sawmill or the cotton gin, the girls
who wore new white gloves to church
on Easter Sunday, we ate peaches right out
of Daddy’s orchards, and balanced ourselves
on the brim of the levee where the river
crooned and hissed. Some said you could
take it all the way to New Orleans and then
the Atlantic Ocean. Daddy never let us
listen to the radio when the news was on.
Sometimes we pretended to be Veronica Lake,
pin curled a wave into our hair so it dipped
across one eye, the other— a moon rising
past the pastures, the horses turned out,
the sand streets and the river cities,
the vast and glittering freehold of the sea.
(first published in Jabberwock Review)
Between them, a myriad of broken shells—
pecans, a bowl of them to be exact. His hands,
and hers, foraging though what must have felt
like a thousand walls to open, small fruits
to be drawn out without their edges breaking.
At that point in both their lives, they were better
at casting aside the flaws, then focusing on perfection.
When she asked him if his wife had any jellies
or chickens she could exhibit at the county fair,
he told her he wasn’t married. That night,
at her booth, they talked about Mississippi,
the Pearl River, a vein running through them both.
That river was a wanton one, by that I mean,
a sandbar at every turn, by that I mean, hairpin,
her long, pale hair, a current released. When he asked
her to marry him, she said yes, by that she meant
the spring, by that she meant, June now or maybe
August. Maybe was a moon she couldn’t swallow,
a gravity to be exact. It was a tenuous light on
a fence she’d remember him leaning against
while he waited for her answer. So she gave in,
minded the store while he shaved, bought a dress
on the way to the Baptist Parsonage in Natchez.
(first published in Deep South)