Bøger udgivet af Stephen F. Austin State University Press

In his introductory essay to Landscapes with Figures, Robert Root writes, "The nonfiction of place includes literary works in which setting has such a presence in its impact upon characters or events or atmosphere that specific place is inextricable." Many of the essays in Chrysopoeia express the sense of place. As the list of countries and regions traveled to in the writing of these essays demonstrates, being in those spaces is an important part of the narrative and meaning-making. The essays in Chrysopoeia weave time and location to explore the tensions and opportunities of family and place. Readers will learn about calendar-keeping, a lost madonna, prayer trees, sculpture gardens, and enchanted cuisine. Readers will travel to Istanbul's Grand Bazaar, Ireland's Cliff of Moher, Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park, and the American Midwest. And yet each piece is its own crucible of transformation where the narrator thinks through language and place to make meaning from changing relationships: miscarriage, birth, death, union, divorce.

Abraham Aamidor's newest collection of short stories, Don't Go, features speculative and realistic fiction together, creating a balanced body of original stories. Inspired by the Hermann Hesse classic, this quest for meaning begins in a trailer park with a pimply-faced young man. A computer "nerd" tries to get a date with the beautiful daughter of his landlord. A religious boy protests the Biblical story; why would Isaac have even submitted to his own prescribed death? A wisecracking Jewish newspaper reporter in Chicago knows the Windy City better than he knows himself. A Palestinian and a former Kibbutz volunteer meet at college in America and learn to see each other with new eyes. A young man is thrown into homelessness and traverses neither Route 66 across America nor settles in the Left Bank in France, but inhabits hidden sites in his own backyard. An earnest young man searches for truth and is disappointed; his hoped-for mentor may not even be real, and he knows he must fall back on his own resources. Aamidor doesn't miss in his new collection of immersive, inventive short stories, Don't Go.

Dreaming of Endangered Species explores issues of health and illness, disability and cure, and human frailty and vulnerability in an age of global unease and uncertainty. It maps a tension between the infinite and finite, between the concrete and ethereal. In some ways, it is a celebration of the mundane, by which I mean the world of everyday objects, of plants and animals, scents, textures, movements, water, and phases of the moon. But interwoven with this testament to ineffable beauty, this celebratory mode, are reflections on my cancer, for example, my autistic strivings, my gender queer identity, and the plight of the natural world. A recurrent thread that runs through the manuscript is the idea of dreaming, which offers a kind of poetic membrane, a connective tissue that softens some of the weighty concerns and allows them a more muted resonance than they might otherwise have.

June 1928. Houston, Texas is poised to host the National Democratic Convention when a lynching occurs six days prior to the political conclave's opening. Fort Worth Star Telegram reporter Phillis Flanagan is on the scene and witnesses Houston's attempts to rid itself of the shame as 25,000 visitors arrive for their four-day visit. Will Rogers, H. L. Mencken, Damon Runyan, Louella Parsons, and Will Durant are among the 500 journalists who have plenty to say about national politics and Houston residents, as well as the city's intolerable weather. During the Convention, Phillis gets an inside look at women's struggle to enter politics and Houston's cover up of the shameful crime, as she painfully learns that some news stories can never be written.

Building Brownville explores forms of grief through the internalization of experience and wanders further to wonder if the past is too far away to fix the present while also serving as a love letter to Nebraska. This collection offers a millennial voice within poetry--a voice that not only subverts the norm of what poetry is but defies the stereotypes of a region, offering connection through grief, love, and place--to experience a somewhere which we have never been.

The Wonder Years is a book made from wreckage. And with materials unceasingly sharp and surprising, Katsimbras creates a language of "clean brutality." In these pages, the drought-wracked West decays into a coyote's rib bones, the animal split into ribbons and tied around nightfall. Families are torn, a marriage cracks, relationships fail, and "in the spaces between all the names for empty that will never fill," the magic here is the feat of existence amid so many disappearing acts. Though unflinching in their examination of hurt, Katsimbras' poems are fierce with protection and love. The relationship between father and son is a rebellion against history-a promise in ink and blood to sever a cycle of paternal harm, to be a true light, even if just a single bare bulb, shining against the coming dark.

Book of Beginnings and Ends focuses on the continuing dance between initial and terminal experiences, effects, and conditions. The poems in the book's four sections come in a wide variety of tones and emotional postures, from hilarity to deep grief, in their quest for balance, some means of containing and celebrating both extremes. The poems propose, in fact, that, along with a persistent kindness, achieving and celebrating such balance is life's essential work. This new volume takes on its subject matter with the lyric imagination, tenderness, clarity and force readers of Howell's writing have come to expect.

Written against the harrowing backdrop of climate change, Green Regalia explores our precarious ecological moment and increasingly fraught relationship with the natural world. Green Regalia chronicles the objectification of landscapes and the species within them, the cultural denial of the body's transient nature, and the aftermath of an estranged father's death. These poems of rot and renewal seek a wisdom free of domination, where both wonder and surrender may remind us of our place in the greater tapestry of life. Poems from Green Regalia have appeared in some of our nation's best journals, including Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Massachusetts Review, Willow Springs, Ninth Letter, Southwest Review, Poet Lore, Western Humanities Review, and Tampa Review, among many others.

"Ginger Hendrix's finely crafted memoir, Church Girl is a Gay, recounts her life in unflinching detail. In a state centered in the Bible Belt, in the center of a proudly Christian city, Hendrix tells her story with white-hot honesty as she writes, '. . . off every road I'd ever traveled was littered with the footprints of youth group leaders leading games out of my garage. And it wasn't until my heart broke so badly that I couldn't stand up under the pain that my feet went looking for the soft, sandy ground of places where people weren't sure of most anything. I was married with three kids, a leader in an evangelical non-profit. I was 48, and I knew my insides felt built to love a woman. But I still didn't know I was gay--because I'd never asked the question. There was no question available to ask.'"--

In Out of Nowhere, Susan Comninos pays homage to the long and varied traditions of poets who have come before her and turns poetry on its head. Inthese pages, "No barrow depends on this / trio of hens," nudists visiting an art museum become the spectacle themselves, and maple buds "fist their way / Open." On each page, a gift-a surprise-a riot of language! These poems are sassy, provocative, perfectly cut. The fantasy of nudists visiting the Louvre in "Naked Admission" is a wild, well-wrought hoot. The manuscript holds great depth, too, in breakthrough poems such as "Childlessness" or "Lullaby." These poems are "to be of use," as Marge Piercy once wrote. Their use is to delight, console and nurture our spirits through troubled times.

"What's Left to Learn, part mystery part romance, renders the story of a former academic turned vintage car expert in pursuit of a manipulative, philandering photographer who disappeared nineteen years ago... Self-consciously witty, drawn to women who are both covert and beautiful, and driven by a primal need to understand the world's dark secrets, Michael Drayton finds himself attracted to an intelligent if cautious woman whose emotional wounds seem linked to the missing photographer. The protagonist grows increasingly urgent in his search for the photographer. A valuable, bullet-strewn car with artistic photos in the glove box, photos that will surely embarrass their subjects, compels the protagonist to discover what happened to the car's long-gone owner... The protagonist is not only compelled to solve what turns out to be multiple mysteries revolving around the talented if ethically challenged photographer; he discovers insights into his own understanding of heterosexual relationships as well as changing notions about ideal beauty and even the deepest components of attraction."--Amazon.com.

In this rich collection, Paul J. Willis invites you in and ushers you out to meet your neighbours and yourself. Getting to Gardisky Lake switchbacks from roadside maples to backcountry sequoia groves, from the lost curves of a high school track to the shining calves of Olympic hopefuls, from grade school crushes to married affection, from dumpster diving to shopping the mall.

In Edge of the Wind, a 25 year-old black man is off his meds and has begun hearing voices. For months, he has done nothing but read and write poetry. One day, he is convinced writing poetry is his calling. James Cherry holds nothing back as he tackles mental illness and the importance of relationships in this debut novel.

Greg Kuzma has been a central figure in American poetry since the late 1970s. This new volume, Selected Poems, focuses on the best of his shorter poems. These selections are culled from a number of his books, all of them out of print. Additionally, some of the selections are taken from hard-to-find, limited edition fine-press titles.

Thirteen Rivers: The Last Voyage of La Belle is a historical novel based on the true saga of French explorer Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle and his colony. Hurricanes, pirates in the Caribbean, ship-wreck, betrayal, revenge, Indian war parties, kidnapping, and murder are all illustrated in a chronicle of events only life itself could inspire.

A tour de force of baseball short stories that reveal more than relations about the game of life. Like a baseball's cushioned cork core, these stories illuminate what's central to our lives - our dreams, both those that can be reached, and those which remain unreachable.

John Perryman's latest collection of stories dramatizes varieties of reckonings familiar to Texans, and Americans, in the twenty-first century. In his stories, flawed but earnest figures struggle to come to terms with betrayal, murder, shattered dreams, failed efforts at redemption, and worse, failure to recognise opportunities for redemption.

Takes place in the racially divisive mid-twentieth century south and includes mob violence, political cowardice, family conflict and mental illness; however, the focus of the collection is on ordinary people forced to make decisions in a morally confused, deeply divided world.

Chronicles the hardships Homer Eubanks and many others faced during the first half of the 20th Century - poverty, World War I, Spanish Flu, the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, World War II - a time that ran over the weak and produced a generation of strong, tough, battle-scarred folks who dealt with more adversity than anyone deserved.

The narratives throughout Gary Fincke's Nothing Falls from Nowhere contain events told by an ordinary person caught up in the mundane action of day to day living but preoccupied by the dismal prospects life has to offer.

A true American demotic, Bill's Boys is a difficult register, but here's a poet able to tackle it. Not since the late, great, Thomas McGrath has a poet spoken so clearly of working class life in its own true tone, as McEwen does here in grim stories from hardworking lives, unsparing, unsentimental but shot through with love and courage.

In his latest volume of poems, John Bargowski has moved on from where he was a decade ago in Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway. This time, he's pushed out from those powerful cityscapes he gave us then to include a whole slice of rural life, returning to the farmscapes of his grandfather's world.

Christopher Lukas arranges his wonderful short stories into three sections: 'Lust and Love', 'Love and Loss', and 'At Close of Day'. Although the stories are not linked by character or by action leading a progress, the sections suggest such a progression for human experience.

Shares stories and historical interpretations with wide audience appeal. The collection in this book is meant to inform, entertain, and perhaps make one ponder how the state's past has developed and progressed.

About Christopher Buckley, the late poet Peter Everwine writes, 'I don't think that I know of another poet who has such vertical range and depth'. Buckley's newest collection, Pre-Eternity of the World, is persistently the kind of poetry Everwine describes

The ability to see from contrary vantage points poises Kevin Clark in a place where he can lead us to the simplest blessings. This is no forgetting, and, in Kevin Clark's world, all things are consecrated and holy

Presents a remarkable collection of essays that find Robert Lacy - post-Marine Corps - working in a funeral, interviewing Martin Luther King, going off to the Iowa Writers Workshop to work with the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, and landing in the cold comfort of place in Minnesota.