Selvage

Threaded with the colors and textures of the small-town South, this startling first collection by Donna Johnson opens up a world of unwashed secrets and messy truths, the sometimes unflattering iterations of “self” that emerge as a lifetime unspools. Through voices both imagined and real—“part cottonmouth; the other part, lark”—Johnson peoples this collection with debutantes, bigots, and busybodies, comprising a whole both shameless but often hidden, like selvage itself, “dense as nuclei / a dot for each color of the cloth / visible only if rent.”