Wes Tirey is a cowpunk troubadour from the Midwest. An Ohio native, he rode the hillbilly highway in reverse, crafting gorgeous and haunting songs on his way to Asheville, North Carolina, where he now lives. Tirey is 39, wiry and taut, gray-grizzled a bit beyond his years. “Hard living,” he explained, ramming a cigarette into an ashtray.

Tirey reached out to me last summer to discuss literature. I’d recently published a biography of Frank Stanford, the charismatic and troubled Ozarkian poet with a fierce cult of acolytes, a man dead by suicide at 29. Tirey admired Stanford’s backcountry patois, his violence, and his all-or-nothing obsession with craft. 

In a request that revealed Tirey’s own aesthetic philosophy, he asked me to share some unpublished Stanford poems — scribbles, drafts, outtakes, maybe a drunken ramble or two. He wanted something of Stanford’s that existed as far from …