Summary

DIXIE DEATH DIARY is not just a poetry collection—it's a cinematic exorcism. A visceral Southern reckoning scrawled in blood, sweat, and cigarette ash. These aren't poems that whisper politely from the page. They kick the door in, drag the past through gravel, and dare you to look away.

This is Southern Gothic reborn in a shotgun blast of storytelling. Told through the voice of Locke Wood—a mythic outlaw-poet navigating trauma, addiction, lust, grief, class, legacy, and rebellion—the book becomes both a diary and a confession booth. Each piece is a scene. A pulse. A scar. And together they form a narrative stitched in pain, memory, and raw humanity.

You'll walk through rusted trailer parks and roadside bars, tiptoe into motel bathrooms and bedrooms heavy with unspoken history. There are women with eyes like omens. Fathers who vanish behind the smoke. Friends who never made it out alive. There's whiskey and bone dust and the echo of one last fight before morning breaks.

Structured like a cinematic spiral, Dixie Death Diary moves between poetic free verse, narrative prose, and fragmented memory. It's soaked in the red clay of the Carolinas and the haunted backroads of the Virginia coast. There are no safety nets here. Just cigarette burns, busted knuckles, and the beauty of the broken.

Locke writes like Bukowski in a thunderstorm—part confession, part prophecy, and all heart. Think Southern noir meets outlaw gospel. A voice that blends the lyrical and the profane, the beautiful and the brutal. Whether he's describing the moment a lover walks out or the sound of a shotgun chambering in a dark garage, every line is alive with risk.

And yet—beneath the grit—there's hope. Not the easy kind. Not redemption tied with a bow. But the hard-won kind you find in a stranger's eyes at 3 a.m. Or in the line of a poem that hits too close to home. It's the hope that someone might still be listening. Might still understand.

This book is for the ones clawing for meaning after midnight. For those who've been pushed to the edge—and wrote their way back. For anyone who ever lit a fire just to feel something warm.

DIXIE DEATH DIARY is a graveyard of Southern ghosts—and a resurrection of what refuses to die.

Author Biography

Locke Wood isn't just a writer—he's a storm survivor in human form, a Southern myth burning through the page.

Born in Virginia, shaped by the Southern coasts, and forged in the backstreets and barrooms of a thousand quiet wars, Locke writes like a man who's run from ghosts and made peace with none of them. His voice doesn't whisper—it haunts, howls, and leaves cigarette burns in the margins. He doesn't write to please. He writes to survive.

Midnight Don't Love You Back and Dixie Death Diary are more than books. They're Southern gothic dirges sung over bar stools, trauma-fueled roadmaps through America's overlooked underbelly. Each line's carved with bone, soaked in whiskey, and delivered with the rhythm of a man who's been to hell, borrowed a pen, and made it out with the story still breathing.

Locke's work blurs the line between memoir and myth. His poetry reads like shotgun sermons—intimate, brutal, cinematic. Think Bukowski dipped in gasoline, set against Southern sunsets and prison phone calls. Think Tarantino, if Tarantino bled through a typewriter instead of a camera. Each piece he writes is a confession at the edge of a cliff, somewhere between gospel and gunfire.

He's a one-man production crew, filming stripped-down short films based on his poetry—backseat confessionals, motel betrayals, and Appalachian monologues—grit-glazed and spoken aloud like prayers for the damned. His indie film project The Last Outlaw Poet brings those stories to life, weaving music, voice, and raw performance into a living, breathing mythos.

His Southern roots aren't nostalgic. They're scorched. He doesn't glorify tradition—he wrestles it. He tells stories from the cracks in the floorboards, the silence between gunshots, and the quiet places no one talks about at church.

Locke lives where memory and reckoning meet. Where masculinity breaks open. Where pain isn't cleaned up for company. But there's beauty here, too. A strange tenderness in the wreckage. His stories don't end with healing—they end with survival.

When he's not writing, Locke's likely somewhere in the mountains of North Carolina with a whiskey glass in one hand, a camera in the other, and his dog by his side. He believes in fire. In the power of voice. In the strange religion of those who still speak the truth, even when it hurts to say it.

If you've ever felt too wild, too broken, too much—or not enough—Locke Wood has written something for you.

And he's just getting started.

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