Exulting in the speech of his native Alabama, Rodney Jones's new poems combine satire and ode, formal lament and ribald joke. James Dickey praised this poet's early work as "one of our most poignant and inescapable renditions of the agony at the historical razor's edge." Now, in his sixth book, Jones extends his emotional and stylistic range. He writes of football and feminism, of DDT and family, of crows and sex, of ink and raccoons and perpetual-motion machines. In many of these poems the southern drawl lives forever, riding on the tide of regional language, poking fun yet delighting in it.
This new edition of Southern Writers assumes its distinguished predecessor's place as the essential reference on literary artists of the American South. Broadly expanded and thoroughly revised, it boasts 604 entries-nearly double the earlier edition's-written by 264 scholars. For every figure major and minor, from the venerable and canonical to the fresh and innovative, a biographical sketch and chronological list of published works provide comprehensive, concise, up-to-date information. Here in one convenient source are the South's novelists and short story writers, poets and dramatists, memoirists and essayists, journalists, scholars, and biographers from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. What constitutes a "southern writer" is always a matter for debate. Editors Joseph M. Flora and Amber Vogel have used a generous definition that turns on having a significant connection to the region, in either a personal or literary sense. New to this volume are younger writers who have emerged in the quarter century since the dictionary's original publication, as well as older talents previously unknown or unacknowledged. For almost every writer found in the previous edition, a new biography has been commissioned. Drawn from the very best minds on southern literature and covering the full spectrum of its practitioners, Southern Writers is an indispensable reference book for anyone intrigued by the subject.
Quirke—the hard-drinking, insatiably curious Dublin pathologist—is back, and he's determined to find his daughter's best friend, a well-connected young doctor April Latimer has vanished. A junior doctor at a local hospital, she is something of a scandal in the conservative and highly patriarchal society of 1950s Dublin. Though her family is one of the most respected in the city, she is known for being independent-minded; her taste in men, for instance, is decidedly unconventional. Now April has disappeared, and her friend Phoebe Griffin suspects the worst. Frantic, Phoebe seeks out Quirke, her brilliant but erratic father, and asks him for help. Sober again after intensive treatment for alcoholism, Quirke enlists his old sparring partner, Detective Inspector Hackett, in the search for the missing young woman. In their separate ways the two men follow April's trail through some of the darker byways of the city to uncover crucial information on her whereabouts. And as Quirke becomes deeply involved in April's murky story, he encounters complicated and ugly truths about family savagery, Catholic ruthlessness, and race hatred. Both an absorbing crime novel and a brilliant portrait of the difficult and relentless love between a father and his daughter, this is Benjamin Black at his sparkling best.
In Hillbilly elegy, J.D. Vance described how his family moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan while navigating the collective demons of the past. The book has come to define Appalachia for much of the nation. This collection of essays is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Vance's book to allow Appalachians to tell their own diverse and complex stories of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. -- adapted from back cover
“Daniel Cross Turner has made a key contribution to the critical study and appreciation of the diverse field of contemporary Southern poetics. “Southern Crossings” crosses a gulf in contemporary poetry criticism while using the idea—or ideas, many and contrary—of “Southernness” to appraise poetries created from the profuse, tangled histories of the region. Turner’s close readings are dynamic, even lyrical. He offers a new understanding of rhythm’s central place in contemporary poetry while considering the work of fifteen poets. Through his focus on varied yet interwoven forms of cultural memory, Turner also shows that memory is not, in fact, passé. The way we remember has as much to say about our present as our past: memory is living, shifting, culturally formed and framed. This is a valuable and important book that entwines new visions of poetic forms with forms of regional remembrance and identity.”—Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Native Guard: Poems Offering new perspectives on a diversity of recent and still-practicing southern poets, from Robert Penn Warren and James Dickey to Betty Adcock, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, Natasha Trethewey, and others, this study brilliantly illustrates poetry’s value as a genre well suited to investigating historical conditions and the ways in which they are culturally assimilated and remembered. Daniel Cross Turner sets the stage for his wide-ranging explorations with an introductory discussion of the famous Fugitive poets John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson and their vision of a “constant southerness” that included an emphasis on community and kinship, remembrance of the Civil War and its glorified pathos of defeat, and a distinctively southern (white) voice. Combining poetic theory with memory studies, he then shows how later poets, with their own unique forms of cultural remembrance, have reimagined and critiqued the idealized view of the South offered by the Fugitives. This more recent work reflects not just trauma and nostalgia but makes equally trenchant uses of the past, including historiophoty (the recording of history through visual images) and countermemory (resistant strains of cultural memory that disrupt official historical accounts). As Turner demonstrates, the range of poetries produced within and about the American South from the 1950s to the present helps us to recalibrate theories of collective remembrance on regional, national, and even transnational levels. With its array of new insights on poets of considerable reputation—six of the writers discussed here have won at least one Pulitzer Prize for poetry—Southern Crossings makes a signal contribution to the study of not only modern poetics and literary theory but also of the U.S. South and its place in the larger world. Daniel Cross Turner is an assistant professor of English at Coastal Carolina University. His articles, which focus on regional definition in national and global contexts and on aesthetic forms’ potential to record historical transitions, appear in edited collections as well as journals including Genre, Mosaic, the Southern Literary Journal, the Southern Quarterly, and the Mississippi Quarterly.
Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era is an edited collection of critical essays and poetry that investigates contemporary elegy within the black diaspora. Scores of contemporary writers have turned to elegiac poetry and prose in order to militate against the white supremacist logic that has led to recent deaths of unarmed black men, women, and children. This volume combines scholarly and creative understandings of the elegy in order to discern how mourning feeds our political awareness in this dystopian time as writers attempt to see, hear, and say something in relation to the bodies of the dead as well as to living readers. Moreover, this book provides a model for how to productively interweave theoretical and deeply personal accounts to encourage discussions about art and activism that transgress disciplinary boundaries, as well as lines of race, gender, class, and nation.
Rodney Jones has long been praised for his masterly storytelling and the bold southern voice he brings to his poetry. Salvation Blues celebrates the range and evolution of his work over a twenty-year period with one hundred selected poems -- including twenty-four bold pieces published only in this collection.
Solway argues in this feisty and polemical book that the time has arrived to take stock and engage passionately with our literature, and especially our poetry, if it is ever to be rescued from the swamp of second-ratedness into which it has descended. He contends that almost all of the poetry (and much of the fiction) being written in Canada these days is turgid, spurious and pedestrian, the result of two highly questionable developments: the proliferation of Creative Writing departments in universities throughout the country, and a largely subsidized literature industry, abetted by a press of cousinly critics and reviewers, intended to construct a patchwork national psyche, create a sense of ideological cohesion and glorify the tribe. In consequence of this we have sponsored a coterie of underachieving overproducers and proceeded to collude in their diffusion by virtue of our silent complicity or our chauvinism. Solway believes that we are on the whole far too nice, far too politically correct and, in a word, far too `Canadian', to register our disapproval bluntly and agonistically. The last thing we want to do is offend anyone. But all that such manoeuvres ensure is that nothing changes while conscience is appeased. There comes a time when diffidence and affability, those specifically Canadian virtues, work against our best interests and prevent the candid and occasionally brutal assessments without which the critical stupor and aesthetic fog so congenial to us must remain destructively in place. In Director's Cut,Solway attempts to dispel that fog, to see clearly and to speak directly to a readership that has been far too receptive of questionable work.
