Southern and Miscellaneous Poems | Thos. Q. Barnes

Originally published in 1886, Southern and Miscellaneous Poems collects the verse of Thomas Q. Barnes of Mobile, Alabama—an ex-Confederate soldier who wrote of war, love, and loss with the raw sentimentality of a man who had seen too much and survived to tell of it. Now, thanks to those dunderheads at Dunce Books, this 60-page collection is back in print, saddle-stitched and beautifully bound in heavy gray stock with fine interior paper.

Of course, the South has been canceled, and everyone knows you can’t go around suggesting that its poets were human beings with interior lives, or that Confederate soldiers were anything but irredeemable villains. We’re toppling statues, not publishing verse! And yet, here are 28 poems, reprinted in a 5.5” x 8.5” edition for anyone foolish enough to be curious. Maybe even the dummies at Dunce Books know that history, for better or worse, cannot be erased—only revisited, re-examined, and, perhaps, republished.