In Georgia, poets are national heroes.

What are you doing, Natia? “I am staining my lips with walnut juice.” Walnut juice? “Yes. When I was a little girl we used it as lipstick.” A poetic traffic jam in the Pshavi mountains of eastern Georgia. Photograph by Paul Salopek Natia Khuluzauri, my guide in the hills of eastern Georgia, rubs the walnut’s sun-yellow hull against her lips.