Bøger i Southern Messenger Poets serien

In Ghostlight, a long-awaited second collection of original poems by Ryan Wilson, considers the haunting of the contemporary mind. With virtuosic formal variety and masterful craft, these poems range from rural America to Italy to the Holy Land, as they chronicle the dynamism of a spiritual odyssey toward the eternal through both past and present. Wilson employs sonnets, Pindaric and ballad stanzas, alliterative hemistichs in imitation of the Anglo-Saxon, and other ancient forms to enlighten the modern experience, from smartphones and Facebook to jumbo jets, entangled in a reciprocal relationship with myths, sacred literature, and traditions. Revealing that the past and the everlasting can inform the present at any given moment, In Ghostlight conveys how a vision acknowledging this dual illumination helps us understand ourselves and others in our fraught, complex era.

Alabama focuses on a boy from a rural, fundamentalist community who becomes a pacifist, feminist, and existentialist poet. Labyrinth, meditation, fable, and peasant poem, formed from interleaved strands of prose vignettes and lineated poetry, this collection is at once a tale of cultural exile and familial loyalty, and an unflinching look at regional shame that doubles as a love story, all expressed with the intimate voice and vision of Rodney Jones.

Moving effortlessly from Virginia to Italy and beyond, Ron Smith's new volume responds with a range of emotions from humor to horror and with a variety of forms from the sonnet to visually expressive organic shapes. The book's forty-three pieces gather themselves into three flights that hover above and touch down among the politics of memory and the psychology of beauty. With inspiration drawn from memoir, myth, history, fiction, and the visual arts, That Beauty in the Trees presents, ponders, and sometimes judges the actions, fates, and aesthetics of not only the author's friends and family but also legendary and historical figures, including Achilles, Catullus, George Washington, Edgar Allan Poe, H.D., Ezra Pound, and many more.

Gathers a chorus from the storytelling working classes of the Upper South. In narrative poems made of sinewy, Whitmanesque lines, Bobby Rogers composes portraits of dwellers in the small towns, unincorporated communities, and hard-edged cities they have flown to, always packing their past with them, an inheritance as ephemeral as vapour.

With graceful lines swooping like a bird in flight, Claudia Emerson's newest collection explores the harsh realities of aging and the limitations of the human body, as well as the loneliness, fear, and anger that can accompany us as we live.

In poems that confront a region indelibly shaped by environmental turmoil, economic erasure, and the weight of an outside world intent on destroying it, Daniel Boone's Window works to reclaim and reckon with the realities and complexities of Appalachia.

Poet and novelist Ashley Mace Havird confronts global and personal change. Her subjects range from the extinction of a prehuman species to the present-day reduction in sea life due to the climate crisis. Closer to home, she confronts the death of her father and her own aging.

A collection that explores the interplay of human consciousness and objective reality, always in celebration of the imaginative spirit that brings them into a productive and often spiritual conversation.

In his latest collection of poems, Ron Houchin replies with sensitivity and wit to things noticed or sensed, offering a celebration of sights, sounds, and objects that elicit responses through the phenomena of their being.

The Piercing celebrates the here and now while endorsing a deep faith in the necessity of the imagination. In response to life in a literal world, Christine Garren's lyric poems ignite belief in exhilaration. Ordinary settings -- a park, a pond, a littered vacant lot, an attic room -- through Garren's eyes reveal something extraordinary. For example, in "February Snow," the poet surveys a winter scene through the windows of various rooms and reflects how "Sometimes it is beautiful, in some of the minutes / then ordinary again -- /... that feeling / of air in the midst of burial." In "The Well," she writes of reaching an impasse in a relationship: "The exhilarating life is finished. We must accept it / this late afternoon and move / back into the rational world." Spare, quiet, visual distillations of the physical and emotional dimensions of the moment define The Piercing with a driving energy at once delicate and fierce.Small piercing as if in the earlobe your leaving caused. Air is filling it now, time fills it, the view through these windows fills the tiny hole.The people on the street, the manic father, the other father carrying his child in pink -- thismillimeter's width opening is for a decade to fit through.Look, there you go. There I go -- there our landscape goes as ifthrough a fantastical roof's hole, the shingle pulled off, the nail off -- our death isflying over the city. -- "The Piercing"

In The Infinity Sessions, T. R. Hummer achieves a radical act of translation, creating poems that project the narrative of twentieth century America implicit in the syncopated rhythms of jazz and blues. Hummer boldly stands up as a poet and rides with some of the obscure greats with whom he feels a deep kinship--Jimmie Lunceford, Adrian Rollini, Big Maybelle Smith, and Sun Ra--in a dazzling poetic cycle as melodic, surprising, and improvisational as the finest of jazz music. His vaultingly ambitious collection is a work of grace and nuance, its conveyance of music in words incisively original in achieving this "impossible" translation.

Spiraling between the tenses of time, David Huddle creates in these vibrant poems a defense against the encroachment of age through the resources of language and memory, imagination and art. Moments recollected, and admittedly embellished, from his own life and family seem appealingly familiar.

Molding his artistry and buttressing his response to modern society with the literature of the ancient world, Sidney Burris displays in his work an unabashed reverence for the various traditions, literary, cultural, familial, that guide him, but maintains that these conventions must now and again be interrogated and overthrown.

This superb collection of new and older work shows James Seay's sure progress from the reflection of first influences to the strongly individual voice of his later pieces. As always, Seay evokes a profound sense of history and place, the landscape, colours, scents, and musical vocal cadences of his native South and the world at large.

A woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. The most personal of Claudia Emerson's poetry collections, Late Wife is both an elegy and a celebration of a rich present informed by a complex past.

"Useless Virtues", T. R. Hummer's seventh book of poetry, is a wide-ranging series of forays into metaphysical territory. Its presiding inquiry concerns the dependency of our consciousness and our spirit on the untrustworthy powers of language.

At ease equally in poetry and prose, David Huddle is an immensely talented writer esteemed for his shrewd powers of observation, ear for authentic voices, and ability to set forth painful truth with stunning effect. Summer Lake is a beautifully coherent compilation of Huddle's best poetry to date.

In these fifty-five poems that compose Late Leisure, Eleanor Ross Taylor shares dramatic, symbolic, intensely personal outpourings of her evolving consciousness, "myself capriciously ongoing", as poet, woman, and elder.

With a nod toward the grounding inspiration of Mark Twain and James Baldwin in its opening epigraphs, this lush collection of free and formal verse, turning on multiple axes of race, religion, history, politics, and social issues, soars in exploration of the dark, troublesome visions of America.

Celebrated poet Julie Kane returns to her Boston Irish Catholic roots in this collection about mothers and daughters shaped by the forces of Irish history and Irish-American culture. Kane confronts how the legacy of personal trauma gets passed down to subsequent generations, with a focus on women from her family history.

Prolific poet and novelist David Huddle reflects on turning seventy-six years of age and records his aghast reactions to changes brought about by the current president of the United States. Huddle embraces the potential of poetry to use intelligence, wit, language, knowledge, and sense of form to move toward useful revelations.

The poems of In the Months of My Son's Recovery inhabit the voice and point of view of the mother of a heroin addict who enters recovery. With clear perception and precise emotional tones, Kate Daniels explores recovery experiences from multiple, evolving vantage points.

In Moth, Jane Springer uses shaped poems, prose poems, and poems with unusual structures to soar through time and the natural world. Yet, while her lines are aesthetically playful, she examines serious subjects.

A poetic study of the eternal, T.R. Hummer's new collection Eon, as with the other volumes in this trilogy, Ephemeron and Skandalon, offers meditations on the brief arc of our existence, death, and beyond.

A bold, brassy, yet delicate vision of a woman's growth. Imbued with a unique poetic voice that is utterly feminist, these poems possess a fiery intensity for those abuses no woman can ever quite recover from, but also reveal the loving, forgiving temperament of the mother no woman can do without.

Over nearly fifty years, Eleanor Ross Taylor has established herself as one of the foremost southern poets of her generation. Captive Voices gathers selections from Taylor's five previous books along with a generous helping of new poems.