I don’t subscribe to Southern Poetry Review, but I do make a point of picking it up at bookstores and browsing through it. But I never buy it because, inevitably, I am disappointed.

I want to like a magazine that specializes in poetry and comes at it from a Southern perspective. I love poetry. The literary magazines I read are almost invariably focused on poetry. I am also, in my own small way, a bit of a Southerner (my mother, herself an inarguable Southern gentlewoman, and others, might disagree). And because the South is well known for its fiction and prose, but is seen as second rate region for poetry compared to New England, Chicago, and Northern California, I want to see this magazine prove that skilled poesy exists in the South.

But the writing found in Southern Poetry Review almost always seems to fall into the same kind of lazy shorthand that plagues most Southern literature.

The great southern writers had a genius for bringing something innovative to their compositions. Faulkner introduced (and expanded upon) the tools and forms of European high modernism in the service of the Southern obsessions with family, place, and history. Flannery O’Connor’s application of Catholic symbolism and a lurid, gothic sensibility. More recently, I think of Harry Crews’ sudden flashes of nihilistic violence (less so, his extravagantly pornographic sex scenes).

Too many so-called Southern writers use lazy tropes (like “look at all these wacky small town character and there wacky ways,” used either in the service of cheap comedy or in the service of something more serious, but either way they are always of less interest than David Lynch’s middle American vision in Blue Velvet or his northwestern television epic Twin Peaks).

Southern Poetry Review always seems filled with writing that reads like a compendium of “lazy Southern lit tropes as applied to poetry.”