Southern United States

The south is a setting featured in several poems throughout the collection. In “All the Way Live” the speaker and his friend Hieronymus vandalize a statue of Robert E. Lee in a presumably southern city. In “New Folk” the speaker and his friend Jebediah perform on the Chitlin Circuit, which was a string of performing venues that extended throughout the south during segregation in the United States. “Carp Poem” takes place in the New Orleans Parish Jail. Additionally, as the poem’s title suggests, “Satchmo Returns to New Orleans” takes place in the southern city as well. In the poem “Mule Hour” the speaker and their mother take a trip into the South on the back of a mule in search of some abstract dream.

The Villages

The unnamed villages are a group of settings that appears in only one poem in the collection, “Coffin for...