Bøger udgivet af Texas Review Press

"Joshua Robbins's much anticipated and smartly provocative second book, Eschatology in Crayon Wax, evokes a feeling of being caught between a fragile yearning to be transformed and a whirlwind of botched divinity. Robbins faithfully asserts, "Paradise / doesn't care / how you get there. / Only that you try," and is met with divine contempt and a commandment to "shape ashes into ashes" because "besides / I can't tell you what on earth I'm doing." In the world of these poems, all one can do is survive the contradictions and cruel inscrutabilities embedded in a contemporary life of vacant tract houses, RFID, mall shooting bullet casings, drone targets, miscarriages, divorce, and suicide. These poems are in deep conversation with the theodicies of The Book of Job, evangelicalism, class theory, and even the manic crises of Berryman's Dream Songs. At times elegiac, always fearlessly confessional, even tragicomic, Robbins does not resist hope. With intelligence and style to spare, Robbins shows a fierce concern for this world of things, caught as we are between what is and what should be"--

The only Black girl in her immigrant family, Faith Adiele was raised by grandparents who resisted Russian imperialism and embraced American voting rights. With a cast of family members and characters from beloved (or detested) American movies, Voice/Over: A Memoir Breakout in 7 Movies asks who gets to become American and what does it take to be a hero?

In Her Voice: Hänen Äänensä A Hybrid Memoir, Faith Adiele's working-class Finnish immigrant grandmother makes a deathbed comment that inspires Adiele's survival as a Black woman artist in America. A granddaughter's innovative investigation into the legacies of trauma, class, politics, and silence on women's creative lives.

"The poems in Dan Leach's debut collection present lyrical portraits of dying (if not already dead) suburban neighborhoods in South Carolina. Stalled-out construction sites, abandoned shopping malls, and builder grade houses that seem haunted before they're even sold--these are the doomed spaces that populate Leach's work. Stray Latitudes investigates the spiritual and geographical crises of the New South, pitting the individual need for identity against the recent swell of nationalism and the ongoing creep of capitalism. Like the vagrant creature for which the book is named, these are poems that scratch and claw in their search for a place to call home"--

""'The feminists lied,' she tells me. 'They said we could do everything / we wanted.' 'Anything,' I correct her." A book-length narrative in poems, The Familiar explores female mid-life existential crisis through two characters: the Ordinary Self and the Extraordinary Self. A true homebody, satisfied with routine and the comforts of domesticity, the Ordinary Self wakes one day to find that while she's been sleeping - for months? for years? - the Extraordinary Self has wreaked havoc in a blind, desperate attempt to accomplish something - anything - truly great. As the Ordinary Self works to reestablish harmony and order within the household, the Extraordinary Self must come to terms with her failure to meet both the ambitions of her youth and the standards that society has set for her as a mother, as a colleague, and as a spouse. Fabulist and absurdist, The Familiar features a mix of high and low language, philosophy, and pop culture while exploring the effects of second and third-wave feminism. It's a book for anyone who's vacillated between dreams, desires, and ambition on the one hand, and on the other a deeply ingrained need for stability and calm. It's a book for anyone who may be approaching or going through mid-life and thinking, "Oh no. What have I done?""

2023 winner of the Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize.

"Ranked among the top in the nation for its range of overall biodiversity, Alabama is far more variegated than many first assume. With its volatile history, its extraordinary landscapes, and its breadth of human perspectives, Alabamians have been underrepresented in Southern poetry, and this volume seeks to shed light on established and new, diverse voices in the Yellowhammer State."--

"Winner of The 2022 George Garrett Fiction Prize."

"Quiver is a book of reckoning, a book of ghosts, a book of lineal fracture and generational fatherlesness. It's a visceral guide through boyhood into fatherhood. One that yields witness to trauma, erotic shames, brutalities and toxic masculinity, and in so doing, emerges with a speaker beginning to free himself. Patricia Smith said it best: "Quiver will change the way you see.""--

"J.L. Conrad's Recovery inhabits a dreamscape filled with fragments of conversation, remembered loved ones, and the profound disorientation that accompanies loss. The incantatory poems in this sequence, at a time when the only way through is through, imagine ways of moving beyond a body flooded with grief to acceptance of what is: a body marked and wounded, a body trailing ghosts"--

"In questioning the boundaries between the world and oneself, Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers unflinchingly explores the dark eddies of coming of age and coming out. Kelly McQuain's poems are far roaming in setting and far ranging in style, depicting the richness of a rural West Virginia upbringing as well as contemporary adulthood in the big city and abroad. Glints of humor and glimpses of pathos abound in the imaginative leaps these poems take as they tackle such subjects as LGBTQ sexuality, homophobia, domestic abuse, and racism. Unafraid to push the limits of contemporary sonics, McQuain's work is rich in music and varied in form, with new riffs on the sonnet, the villanelle, and the persona poem. Accessible and lyrical, this debut collection deftly explores the homes we come from and the homes we create-all the while shining with wonder and resolve"--

"This collection is compiled from the unpublished poems of Karl Shapiro at the University of Texas in Austin and elsewhere. They are largely as Shapiro left them, in a desk drawer in his apartment in uptown Manhattan"--

"The essay begins as an exploration of James's burgeoning obsession with Peter Sellers, and specifically his role in hijacking and derailing production of the spy spoof, Casino Royale, in the late 1960s. But what begins as a straight reported piece on how the film set erupted into chaos, quickly devolves into its own chaos as the essay splits into 5 different narrators, each with their own agenda of what the essay is actually about. Is it about how Peter Sellers and his oversize ego ruined Casino Royale? Is it about how society has too long allowed horrible men to run the world? Is it an exploration of the nature of the essay as a creative form? Or is Peter Sellers and his genius at impersonation actually a vehicle through which James probes her own shifting identity as a Mexican-American woman? The answer is...yes"--

"An anthology comprising the best of contemporary fiction and nonfiction by South Asian American writers, to spotlight the literary work being produced by the South Asian diaspora in the American South. "The eight short stories and seven essays included in this anthology give us a glimpse of the diverse facets of South Asian experiences in the American South. These narratives do not necessarily weave a homogenous South Asian story in the American South, which is not the aim of this project, but create small, local narratives as windows to the world of transnational exchanges made possible by migrations of various kinds. They, like most all immigrant writing, expound a sense of being in two places but hardly entrenched in any one, the proverbial displacement.""--

Hidden away in an East Texas thicket, Petra Caldwell, the prophetess of a reclusive religious movement called "Acacia," compiles the true account of her life and captivity. But the premonitions and intricate wiles of Petra's predecessor, The Prophetess Mother Salome Nightingale, threaten her dominion.

Gabrielle Civil makes black feminist performance art in Mexico to explore--and expand--the parameters of her own body, artistic process, heritage, and culture. In and Out of Place archives her vibrant 2008-2009 Fulbright project and activates her trajectory as a black woman artist in the world.

Home of the first settlement in the United States and known as Old Dominion and The Mother of Presidents, the state of Virginia's artistic output proves among the most fecund in the nation, evidenced in this ninth volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology. This collection includes well-known, established, and celebrated poets such as Charles Wright, Claudia Emerson, Gregory Orr, Ellen Bryant Voigt, R. T. Smith, Forrest Gander, and Rita Dove, and the editors have dedicated equal focus on newer, diverse poets who continue to broaden and enrich the literary legacy of this beautiful state.

"A collection of eco-feminist poetry set in southeast Texas. This region, sometimes called 'Cancer Alley,' is home to the nation's largest oil refinery. It has also been on the front lines of climate disasters such as Hurricane Harvey, the historic flooding from Tropical Storm Imelda, and just last year, Hurricanes Laura and Hurricane Delta. It's a region that feels the tension of climate change: economically, it is dependent on the oil industry, the same industry that poisons its citizens and threatens its lands existence as sea levels rise. Flare Stacks in Full Bloom explores this tension through a chronicle of Hurricane Harvey--before, during, and after the storm, through formal poetry (sonnets, villanelles, and blank verse narratives)"

Award-winning writer Kathleen Winter turns a loving but critical eye on her Texas past in this lively poetry chapbook. Moving, original, and sometimes very funny, the poems vividly depict moments in the first twenty-five years of an artist's engagement with the world.

A riveting story of how a suicidal African American teenager's forcing a young white cop to kill him devastates the teenager's mother as well the rookie cop. It also sparks a massive race riot and puts the mother and rookie in the crosshairs of a deranged gunman.

Ray's got a problem: His wife's parents have won the lottery - just as he's in the process of leaving her for another woman. Although he's successfully self-employed, how can he avoid the temptation of returning to a marriage that's suddenly a lot more appealing? Set in rural Maine, The Megabucks explores moral choice in an age of economic desperation.

Consequences of a Moonless Night deepens its native primitivism through humour, surrealism, and soul searching lyricism. These poems take the reader on a journey where a grandmother "walks with the Beast of the Apocalypse on a leash" into visions of grief, eroticism, and an indelibly reflective reticence that continues to unfold with each reading.

Michael Gills' third collection of short fiction, continues the life and times of Joey Harvell, whose stepfather, in "Last Words on Lonoke", gives him a.30-06, tells him not to aim at anything he doesn't want to kill, and "that's pretty much it for [his] gun safety lessons."

The stories in Don't Make Me Do Something We'll Both Regret are linked by their exploration of queer evil. The characters are gnostics and mystics, ogres and queens whose defiance of the normative both liberates and confines.