Wrap yourself in the boundless love of the Divine with the mystical poetry of renowned Sufi saint Kabir, here brought to life for modern readers by acclaimed poet Thomas Rain Crowe.“When you’ve come all this way to the ocean of happiness,Do not return home thirsty with an empty cup.Wake up! Here is some pure water,Drink as much as you can!”The enigmatic Indian mystical poet Kabir stands among the grea...

After a long absence from his native southern Appalachians, Thomas Rain Crowe returned to live alone deep in the North Carolina woods. This is Crowe’s chronicle of that time when, for four years, he survived by his own hand without electricity, plumbing, modern-day transportation, or regular income. It is a Walden for today, paced to nature’s rhythms and cycles and filled with a wisdom one gains only through the pursuit of a consciously simple, spiritual, environmentally responsib...

“You don’t need to go looking for answers. Probably the best way to find them is to stop looking for them, in the sense of being still and being in one place.” These words from Thomas Rain Crowe come straight from his own experience. After following the poet’s path through Ireland, France, and the beat neighborhoods of San Francisco, he found a different rhythm and a different muse in the Appalachian woods of North Carolina.

Best Creative Nonfiction of the South serves as a valuable resource for scholars, students, writers, and general readers interested in creative nonfiction both from specific areas of the South and across the region as a whole. This North Carolina volume, second in the series, contains essays that celebrate and document the Tar Heel state’s diverse cultures and geography, from the mountains to the sea. The writers included here come from diverse backgrounds, generations, and artist...