# Volume 56, Issue #2 (August 2025)
# Table of Contents
### **Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies**
##### (formerly Kansas Quarterly)
*Arkansas Review*, Vol. 56, No. 2 (August 2025)
**Video games, Blackness, and the South:**
**The Procedural Antiracist Praxis of Mafia III**...................................................... **83**
by Taylor Orgeron
**The Ozark Flutist (poetry)** ............................................................................................ **98**
by Glenda S. Pliler
**Fixed Match (fiction)** ...................................................................................................... **102**
by Joseph Thomas
[**Four Poems (poetry)**](https://kb.astate.edu/books/volume-56-issue-2-august-2025/page/four-poems) ....................................................................................................... **112**
Off 8th Street
Nest
Audrey’s House
American Flag Chest Piece
by Katherine Kallas
**No Longer Silent: Marguerite and Margaret, Two Arkansan**
**Women Writers and their Shared Stories of the South** ............................... **114**
by Kerri L. Bennett.
**Sparrow Wings (Tala) (fiction)** .................................................................................. **125**
by Michael Copperman
**Two Poems (poetry)** ........................................................................................................ **130**
At a Rural Valero
Invisible Rift
by Tim DeJong
**Grading Don Quixote (fiction)** ................................................................................... **132**
by R.M. Kinder
**Three Poems (poetry)** ...................................................................................................... **140**
Getting in the Cows
Rice Farming
How To Dream the Delta
by CL Bledsoe
**The Unknown Immigrant (fiction)** ............................................................................ **143**
by Murali Kamma
**Delta Sources and Resources** ....................................................................................... **154**
The University of Arkansas Virtual Museum
[ Online Resource](http://sdc.cast.uark.edu/)
by Marcus Charles Tribbett
#### **Reviews** .................................................................................................................................... **155**
Zheng and Touchet, *Still Motion: Poems and Photographs*,
reviewed by Michael A. Antonucci
Bearden, *Mississippi Hippie, A Life in 49 Pieces*,
reviewed by William V. (Bill) Davidson
#### **Contributors** .......................................................................................................................... **159**
---
**Correction: This year, the Spring/April 2025 issue (Arkansas Review Volume 56, Issue 1) was mailed with**
**an incorrect issue number misprinted on the front cover (incorrectly printed as Issue 3). Although the**
**correct issue number is listed on the table of contents page, we sincerely regret the error! The correct**
** version of the front cover appears below and has been updated on our website at arkreview.org.
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-05/4jdimage.png)
---
## **Contributors**
**Michael A. Antonucci** is Professor Emeritus at Keene State College, where he taught courses on Black literature and culture. His monograph *Understanding Michael S. Harper* is available from U of South Carolina P. He is coeditor of the collection of interviews with Michael Harper forthcoming from UP of Mississippi.
**Kerri L. Bennett, PhD,** is an Instructor of English at Arkansas State University, where she teaches Freshman Composition, World Literature, and Heritage Studies Research Seminar. She has co-edited the last four editions of A-State’s first-year writing textbook, the newest of which is *First-Year Composition@Arkansas State University: Writing with the Pack*. She holds an MA in English from Arkansas State, an MAT from the University of Arkansas at Monticello, and a PhD from Arkansas State. Her research interests are in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Women Writers, First-Year Writing, and Multimodal Composition.
**CL Bledsoe** is the author of more than thirty books, including *Riceland* and *Having a Baby to Save a Marriage*. Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his daughter.
**Michael Copperman’s** work has appeared in *The Oxford-American, Guernica, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Boston Review, Salon, Gulf Coast, Triquarterly, Kenyon Review,* and *Copper Nickel*, among others, and has won awards and garnered fellowships from the Munster Literature Center, Breadloaf Writers Conference, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission. His memoir *Teacher: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta* (UP of Mississippi, 2017), about the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta, was a finalist for the 2018 Oregon Book Award in CNF. His next book, *Seeking Eden*, about the extremes of the American subculture of wrestling as seen through the story of five-time national champion Kenny Cox’s pilgrimage into the Na Pali jungle, is forthcoming in the Fall of 2026 from U of Iowa P.
**William Van (Bill) Davidson** holds degrees from Rhodes College (BA Political Science 1962), the University of Memphis (MA Geography 1967), and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (PhD Geography 1972). Since 1965 he has conducted field research as a historical-cultural geographer among the minority cultures of Yucatán and Central America, especially in Honduras. He has served as geography editor of the *Handbook of Latin American Studies* at the Library of Congress and is the author of numerous works on the ethnogeography and ethnohistory of Central America and the Caribbean. Retired from the faculty of the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, he and wife Sharon Solomito live in Memphis, Tennessee.
**Tim DeJong** currently lives in central Texas but is originally from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He has poems published or forthcoming in *Waxwing, Image, Rattle, The Penn Review, Modern Language Studies,* and other journals. His poetry has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. His website is timothydejong.com
**Katherine Kallas** is a writer and artist based in Kansas City, Missouri. Her work investigates how memories are constructed and reimagined, exploring themes of nostalgia and home-coming. Her writing has recently been published in *Spires Journal* and *Contemporary Verse 2*. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
**Murali Kamma** is the author of *Not Native: Short Stories of Immigrant Life in an In-Between World* (Wising Up P), which won an Independent Publisher Book Award. A graduate of the University at Buffalo and Loyola College, India, he's the managing editor of *Khabar*, an Atlanta-based magazine in English. His fiction has appeared in *Havik, Evening Street Review, Rosebud, BigCityLit, Apple Valley Review,* and other journals. He has interviewed, among others, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, William Dalrymple, Amitav Ghosh, and Pico Iyer. His fiction has also been published in anthologies like *The Best Asian Short Stories*.
**R.M. Kinder** is the author of three collections of short fiction and two novels: *A Common Person and Other Stories* (Richard Sullivan Award U of Notre Dame 2021); *A Near Perfect Gift* (U of Michigan Literary Fiction Award 2005); *Sweet Angel Band* (Helicon Nine Willa Cather Award 1991); *An Absolute Gentleman* (Counterpoint 2007); and *The Universe Playing Strings* (U of N Mexico P 2016). Her stories and poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including *Descant, Southern Humanity Review, Arts and Letters*, most recently in *Green Hills Literary Lantern*, and is forthcoming in *Main Street Rag*.
**Taylor Orgeron** is a native of Louisiana who resides in Oklahoma as Associate Professor of English in the Department of Language & Literature at Southwestern Oklahoma State University. Her research and teaching interests include first-year composition, digital/multimedia writing, and game studies. Her other work can be found in *The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom* and *Emerging Genres: New Formations of Games*.
**Glenda S. Pliler** is a poet, essayist, and author whose work has appeared in *The Iowa Review, The Christian Science Monitor, The Wittenberg Door,* and elsewhere. Her poetry collection *The Agony of Intimacy* explores the evolution of love and human connection. Originally from Missouri, she now lives and writes in Florida.
**Joseph Thomas** is a graduate student studying creative writing at the University of Louisville. His work has appeared in the *Equinox Literary Magazine, The Laurel Review, Necessary Fiction,* and *Nebo: A Literary Journal*. He holds a BA in English—Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and he is currently working on a short story collection taking place in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
**Marcus Charles Tribbett** is General Editor of *Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies* and Associate Professor of English at Arkansas State University, where he also teaches for the interdisciplinary Heritage Studies doctoral program. He has published scholarly work on classic and contemporary blues performers, on a nineteenth-century slave narrative, and on contemporary novels by Jessmyn Ward and Tupelo Hassman. His most recent work, an essay on New Orleans bluesman Mem Shannon, appeared in *Voices and Visions: Essays on New Orleans’s Literary History*, edited by Nancy Dixon and Leslie Petty (UP of Mississippi, 2025).
Arkansas Review 56.2 (August 2025)
# Four Poems
## By Katherine Kallas
### **Off 8th Street**
Memory is a place shattered by wind
Its pieces swept up into god’s dustpan
and dumped in the Mississippi River
The water is murky here, on the tilted shore off 8th street
Frogs with full lungs, as bulbous as onions
Cicadas scream in high-pitched static
Dragonflies hitch on the water’s surface
wisps of neon blue thread stitch a map
of someone with hair as long as tallgrass
With eyes that hang low
as the branches of a live oak
My boots sink in the mud bruising earth
I pack purple into the collarbones of the bank
Cast my line into the mouth of my reflection
and fish for something fat and familiar
### **Nest**
Memory: something orange, like the glass beads in Jenna’s kitchen windows that separate me from a cloud-coated sky. My therapist tells me: settle into your body, try to find it again. How to find home in something lanky and unending? Burrow in a stomach made of silk and a head stuffed with steel wool.
I wish I could build myself a nest like the sandhill cranes on the shores of the Missouri River. With hearths full of blooming milkweed, burgundy flickering through the sedges. Beds cushioned with ferns and cattails, a muscular roof – a mother’s copper wingspan.
Instead, I hoard loose fibers and margarita straws, trying to construct safety in this body. To pack it full of lace and optimism, and fly to a lighter place.
### **Audrey’s House**
Cicadas are Audrey’s birthday month bug
and sometimes if I close my eyes and believe too much
I can hear them way down in December
I watch girls drive dirt bikes through wiry grass
Churning up dust – all the dead things are alive again
resurrecting the dusty parts of me that July sun dried out
I fear the world spins too fast for me and that I’ll be left
floating on my back in an above-ground pool
somewhere Arkansas
So tonight,
I toast to imperfections
and with grapefruit on my tongue
I raise a glass to late August bitterness
### **American Flag Chest Piece**
Points of contact at the ankle and nose, hook onto each other for stability.
It’s Tornado Alley outside.
I am patriotic when it comes to him.
Light roman candles, we watch the birth of several large stars.
I crawl under his skin, like an American flag chest piece.
Anita says I need to – Grow and learn to yell.
Louder than the static which hovers above fields of tall grass.
Balls of anxiety, mosquitos dart through the air looking for someone sweeter.
“Never settle.”
Red freckled shoulders, houses he constructs in the air, “when we . . .”
Talk of mountains, and toddlers, and porch swings, and balding.
Anita calls me for dinner. Her voice pierces the air, like the sharp salutes from paper bombs exploding on the driveway.
I march in blue boots all the way home
# Delta Sources and Resources
##### The University of Arkansas
Virtual Museum
Online Resource
http://sdc.cast.uark.edu
by Marcus Charles Tribbett
The University of Arkansas Virtual Museum
is an online project jointly created and main-
tained by the Center for Advanced Spatial Tech-
nologies (CAST) that features a number of 3D
models of artifacts from the collections of the Ar-
kansas Archaeological Survey (ARAS) and the
University of Arkansas Museum. Some 210 arti-
facts, cataloged by year of acquisition and
number (Accession Number), have been digitized
and are viewable and manipulable in the Gallery
section of the website.
The virtual museum is of interest mainly to
archaeology researchers, teachers, and aficiona-
dos who wish to virtually examine clay pots,
tools, and artwork of the indigenous cultures of
the region, particularly the Mississippian (with
representative samples of Carden Bottoms Phase
pottery and other Caddoan finds, for example).
However, there are also some artifacts that repre-
sent paleo-historical cultures as well as some
much more recent material culture.
The object viewer allows users to adjust light-
ing, fully rotate the object to observe from all an-
gles, zoom in and out, and find measurements.
The surface layer of the digital scan can also be
removed so that details emerge that may be ob-
scured by the original coloration and decoration
or the discoloration and degradation caused by
time and damage: incised and carved marks on
some objects are thus more easily seen.
One drawback to the site is the minimal
description of the artifacts. However, multiple
searchable fields from a pulldown menu for each
entry do provide some historical and cultural
context. Following a brief descriptive name, each
entry has a field for “Cultural Affiliation,” “Geo-
graphical Region,” Time Range,” and “Reposi-
tory.” For instance, item number 1927-5-37 is a
“Bottle, teapot, Ceramic” from the Carden Bot-
toms Phase in the Arkansas River Valley circa AD
1500-1700 and held by the UA museum. The col-
lection can be filtered by these fields as well. One
caveat: not all fields are complete for every arti-
fact. Still, there is enough summary information
for most entries for the feature to be useful.
An advantage of the virtual museum is that
many of the indigenous artifacts included have
been repatriated to descendant communities and
are displayed on the website by permission of
these descendant groups. By making them avail-
able virtually, professional and amateur research-
ers may centrally view objects of initial interest
that otherwise could be difficult to examine with-
out travel and permission to see them. In times
of shrinking research and travel budgets, this
benefit is especially important.
While the project is in its early stages, the
website briefly discusses planned expansions to
the virtual museum, such as adding additional
pages with more contextual information and
linking newly scanned objects to specific projects
and educational initiatives. While by no means
a vast database at this point, the Virtual Museum
shows great promise for future growth. Even at
its current modest size, researchers and teachers
will find value in the resource. Let us hope it con-
tinues to expand.
# Reviews
##### Still Motion: Poems and Photo-graphs. By Jianqing Zheng & Leo Touchet. Photo Circle Press, 2025. Pp. 62, $15, paperback)
John Berger opens Ways of Seeing by asserting
that “Seeing comes before words.” Explaining his
claim, he writes, “The child looks and recognizes
before it can speak.” Continuing his influential
collection of exploratory essays on sight, recep-
tion, and visual art, Berger identifies “another
sense in which seeing comes before words,” stat-
ing that “it is seeing which establishes our place
in the surrounding world; we explain that world
with words, but words can never undo the fact
that we are surrounded by it. The relation be-
tween what we see and what we know is never
settled.”
Written with clarity, strength, and direction,
throughout its fifty-plus years in print, Ways o f
Seeing has remained relevent for changing au-
diences, over time. For example, Berger cites
René Magritte’s painting The Key of Dreams to il-
lustrate what he describes as the “always-present
gap between words and seeing.” To establish the
foundations of his volume’s argument at the end
of chapter one, he declares, “our vision is contin-
ually moving, continually holding things in a cir-
cle around itself, constituting what is present to
us as we are” (www.ways-of- seeing.com/ch1).
In Still Motion Jianqing Zheng and Leo
Touchet assemble ekphrastic poetry and photo-
graphic images that speak back to the dialogue
that emerges from Ways of Seeing. With the inter-
play between Zheng’s poems and Touchet’s pho-
tographs bridging the “gap between words and
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-08/image-1786376401695.png)
seeing,” this collaborative, interdisciplinary vol-
ume arrives as a contemporary conversational
partner for Berger’s celebrated study, delivering
a collection of stark images and stunning imag-
ery.
At the outset of Still Motion, Zheng provides
a description of the poetic project his contrib-
utions to the collection pursue by writing, “I was
fascinated with Leo’s black-and-white dune pho-
tographs when I received Duet, a collection of
photos and poems by Leo and his wife Liz.” Con-
tinuing, the poet praises Touchet’s work with
sand dunes in Chasing Shadows. He explains that
the images in this collection have not only
shaped Still Motion but informed his own sense
of how ekphrasis works. Zheng writes “ekphratic
writing is not a retelling of what we see in art-
work,” before suggesting that, instead, “it con-
cerns an interaction of the senses,” and arrives as
“a creation from the original art.” Outlining
these perspectives, Zheng explores the writing
process he pursues in the twenty-five poems that
he’s prepared for the volume.
Observing that the “beautiful shapes” in
Touchet’s photographs are “made effective by
light and shadow,” the poet states that they “in-
spire” his verse in the collection. Zheng explains
that the connection between his “ekphrastic po-
etry” and Touchet’s images in the volume repre-
sent “experiments with imagination, language
and synesthesia.” Touchet extends the scope of
these claims in the introduction/project state-
ment that he contributes to Still Motion. Aware
of the appreciation that the poet has for his im-
ages, the photographer writes, “Jianqing was fas-
cinated with my photos of sand dunes and later
reviewed my book Chasing Shadows. He later trav-
eled West to see the dunes himself.” Touchet rec-
ognizes that by going to the dunes, Zheng gained
insight about their ceaseless reconfiguration and
never-ending engagement with light and shadow.
The photographer remarks that, in this way, the
poet came to discover, just as he had, that “the
only time that you can photograph the dunes is
during the first and last half hours of the day
when the sun is low and causing shadows.”
The sensibility arising from this dialogue in-
forms the distinct interplay between the poetry
and photographs in Still Motion. Connecting
both artists’ work, sky and wind shape their
words and images, as the volume delivers its ad-
dress to light and land. Offering their observa-
tions of the delicate, incremental study in
structure and process that are the dunes, Zheng
and Touchet establish the terms of their conver-
sation about space, time, and motion. With their
work conveying this rarified, nearly precious qual-
ity, speaking to sand whispers and shadow si-
lence, poet and photographer capture both
emergence and closure, as the raw and the re-
fined converge in sifting images. The poems and
photographs in Still Motion turn and shift, undu-
late and interface, moving along and across the
page, capturing possibilities for exchange be-
tween line and word, black and white, presence
and absence.
In this way, Still Motion explores intersections
where sight constructs meaning and appearance
assembles perception in the two artists’ work.
The titles of Zheng’s poems—“A Way of Seeing,”
“Questions from Seeing,” “Juxtaposition,” “See-
ing Shadows,” and “Sight to Sight,” among
others—respond to Touchet’s images of the Mes-
quite Flats Sand Dunes and Eureka Valley Dunes
of the Death Valley National Park in California
as well as the Monahas Sand Hills State Park of
Texas. For example, in “The Visual Chord,”
Zheng bends line and sound into a multi-dimen-
sional, ekphrastic reflection. Observing, collect-
ing, and re-assembling elements of a Touchet
Mesquite Flats Dunes photograph, the poem
renders a complex, layered, mirror of the photo-
grapher’s sun-and-shadow emulsion.
These impulses become fully evident in the
opening stanza of “The Visual Chord.” Situating
himself in relation to an evocative photo of sand,
shadow, and light taken by Touchet in Death Val-
ley National Park, the poet proclaims,
The beguiling light and shade form variant
images out of dunes to allure you to grab pic-
tures and exclaim delightful surprises. When
light slides away and you are on your way to
the tent, shade expands inch by inch into an
oblong image unexpected and awesome
again to the eye. (p. 17)
Zheng, thereby, brings his poet and his readers
into the photograph, conducting an image-driven
translation project through his verse in Still Mo-
tion. Transposing the “perception of an image”
into “poetic imagery,” the poet brings his readers
into the extended conversation he conducts with
Basho over the course of the volume. Zheng en-
gages the Japanese master’s hybrid, haibun form
in “The Visual Chord,” moving the poem to its
conclusion with a traditional, three-line haiku
that reads,
stranded on a beach
a humpback whale
in desperate silence. (p. 17)
In this way, throughout Still Motion, the poet
speaks both to and from Touchet’s photographic
imagery. Zheng’s variations on haiku, renga, and
haibun progressions serve as the medium for
sight and sound, along with word and image, to
mirror each other. Within their volume, Zheng
and Touchet excavate and enter the lived mo-
ment. Their collaborative exchange brings au-
diences into a deep, full, and immediate contact
with the possibility and promise that arrive in
their imagistic encounters with place and percep-
tion. As the poems and photographs in the vol-
ume span these spaces, they bridge what Berger
describes in Ways of Seeing as the “always present
gap between words and seeing.” Throughout Still
Motion, Zheng and Touchet open eyes, effectively
illustrating Berger’s contention that “our vision
is continually moving,” changing and illustrating
its capacities, “constituting what is present to us
as we are.”
--Michael A. Antonucci
##### Mississippi Hippie, A Life in 49 Pieces. By Willy Bearden. (Deep Delta Publishing, 2024. Pp. 286, $34.95, hardcover)
In the rural South, boys named “William”
at birth are normally called “Billy” shortly there-
after. A few of them, later on, become labeled
“Willie/Willy.” By high school, almost all of
these people have outgrown “Billy/Willy” and
have become “just plain Bill.” Not many adults
remain “Willy.” Of course, there is the obvious
exception of the famous Willie Nelson . . . and
our author here.
This memoir is by a well-known Memphis
personality who has proven himself quite success-
ful in his chosen enterprises. He has focused
mostly on historical Memphis, in his publica-
tions and photographs, in several heavily-viewed
documentary films, in organizing the University
of Memphis symposia on the Delta, and general
public relations.
His accomplishments might be surprising
given the life he describes in 49 non-chronologi-
cal vignettes.
He grew up in Rolling Fork, a village in the
lower part of the so-called “Mississippi Delta.”
The portrait he paints of the place, and his life
there, is not pretty, but perhaps insightful of
small town life in the American South, and espe-
cially the Mississippi Delta, during the last half
of the twentieth century.
His father participated in the local “society
of alcoholism,” (“a beautiful pack of alcoholics”),
his mother toiled hours daily “on her feet” in a
beauty shop, he was a poor student who learned
to read late and who, embarrassingly, had to re-
peat the seventh grade. At a young age, around
the pool hall, roadhouses, and juke joints he
learned all of the raw, crude clichés of Southern
dialect. Growing up, his victories were few, but
he did manage to tackle Archie Manning in a
high school football game.
Bearden especially likes storytelling and
Mississippi Hippie is his story, “his truth,” that he
hopes might enlighten and inspire others. His
prose shines when he talks about some of the
“characters” in Rolling Fork. These include his
uncle “Doc,” Sheriff Tarleton, and the longtime
jailer.
Following his mother’s guidance to become
literate, the author’s life
took on new meaning.
He became an avid
reader and eventually,
he becomes a devotee of
“Mr. Billy” Faulkner.
That didn’t mean his life
was always smooth there-
after. His early love of
music led to time in
local bands, to a Hippie
sub-culture of “sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll,” then
on to serious long-distance hitchhiking, and just
“hanging out” with a few friends.
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-08/image-1786376494792.png)
Along the way, Willy found that he could
not accept the stereotypical attitudes of his town
folk. On race: Probably because of his early
friendships with black kids, he wasn’t racist. On
war: The anti-Vietnam protester of the 1970s
finds that “I am more anti-war now than I was in
my 20s.” On religion: By his fourteenth year,
Willy had shed his Episcopal/Baptist upbring-
ings and found that he “had little use for
church.” His philosophical summation is simple:
“be nice, or leave.”
Like many from the Delta, after high school
he made his way to Memphis. He saw in Rolling
Fork, as in other Delta towns, “the slow and pain-
ful death that has lasted more than fifty years”
and realized that he had to leave. At the end of
his senior year in high school he drove to the
mental institution outside of Jackson to see his
father and left Rolling Fork. He tried a junior
college and Ole Miss for less than a semester, be-
fore returning to Memphis and a few odd jobs:
wholesale liquor deliveries, sold old tires (at least
tried to), became an ordained “minister,” and
eventually got a job with Motion Picture Labo-
ratory where he, after years, learned the film-mak-
ing trade.
One clear intent of this collection of recol-
lections is to thank all the people who played a
role in his life. In his first chapter, “The Book of
the Dead,” he writes that since his eleventh birth-
day he “kept a list of everyone I knew who had
died.” In his last chapter (“Memorial Day”), he
explains that “a person doesn’t die, for the sec-
ond and final time, until their name is last said.”
Then follows a radically-innovative ending to a
book: he writes the names of 370 deceased
people who he remembers. He wants dearly to
credit others for his successes. But while I do not
know the author, I see it differently. I am more
inclined to believe that he is one of those few
who succeed on their own, from their own inner
strength.
Bearden reeks of “tha Delta,” and loves the
notion of that “place.” Fifty years after high
school, he returned to buy a house in Rolling
Fork where he penned this memoir. Perhaps he
still wants to be called “Willy” because it keeps
him attached to his Delta deep roots.
For those interested in “Delta studies” this
book is a valuable contribution—to understand
life at both personal and community scales.
--William V. (Bill) Davidson