Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P682
ISBN: 9780881469103
Price: $20.00
The poems in Bill King's first full-length collection articulate a life grounded in the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains. We see memories of his youth in southwestern Virginia's Back Creek Valley, as well as poems of adult years in (and exploring the Monongahela Forest that surrounds) the mountain town of Elkins, West Virginia. These poems follow the root of a life nourished by and inseparable from garden soil, mountain rivers, and the hearths and kitchen table of home back to its origins. King's poems offer a language for how to love a world we must, ultimately, leave.
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H821
ISBN: 9780881462302
Product Format: Hardback
Availability: Not currently available. ( Backorder policy)
Price: $26.00
When Cooper Coghlan arrives in Ireland with the cremains of his grandfather, Finn Coghlan, he has one instruction: Let my ashes blow in the wind. Mesmerized by his romantic vision of Ireland, and in those landmarks—Waterford, Youghal, Cork, Killarney, the Ring of Kerry, Tralee, Kenmare, Dingle—the fate of the Irish that Finn Coghlan talked of magically brings Cooper and Kathleen O’Reilly, a public relations specialist, together.
Yet, there is a truth between the two of them that not even the enchanting tale of Finn McCool and Sally Cavanaugh, or of Patrick the Believer, can resolve. For that, Cooper must use the one gift bestowed on him as a child by his grandfather—Bogmeadow’s wish.
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P664
ISBN: 9780881468762
Price: $20.00
Marissa Glover once again addresses herself, with her signature wit and moxie, to matters political and personal, sacred and profane, in a voice at once disarmingly colloquial and slyly erudite. Varying tonal registers with an easy grace, she ranges freely over national affairs of great historical importance and tiny, shrewdly observed incidents from domestic life.
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P514
ISBN: 9780881465396
Price: $15.00
Sequel to the award-winning MOTHER OF RAIN.
When it is a healing they need, the people at Christian Bend, Tennessee, turn to one woman—Burdy Luttrell.
Melungeon by birth, Burdy learned the therapeutic properties of roots from the women in her family. When Burdy discovers that Lincoln Memorial University is hosting a class on healing roots, she persuades her friend, Mayne, to drive her up. The two women make a fateful stop at Laidlow Pharmacy at Bean Station where an armed gunman executes three people and critically injures another.
Burdy—the woman able to cure others—is now fighting for her life at University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville.
Karen Spears Zacharias has crafted a mesmerizing novel of tragedy and transformation, a beautiful rendering of fact and fiction, and a tenderhearted narrative of survivors and the battles they face.
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P530
ISBN: 9780881465730
Price: $18.00
Margaret Norman lives in a family with secrets, not the least of which is her own. But what concerns Margaret more is that her family will not talk about her mother, “Weezie,” an artist who died shortly after Margaret was born. Her father, Jim Norman, a brooding attorney, is too obsessed with his own pain to share. Louisa, her older sister, is hostile toward Margaret and ignores her. Black housekeeper, Ida, who is helping to raise Margaret, does not think it her place to tell what others will not. And gentle great aunt, Maggie, did not know Margaret’s mother.
Set in the South during the 1930s and 1940s, CARDINAL HILL takes place in a world where blacks and whites, although separated by custom and law, often thrive in personal relationships; where half a world away, a war disrupts lives of those close to home; and where little girls suspect that kissing causes babies.
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P528
ISBN: 9780881465716
Price: $17.00
Each poem in this award-winning collection represents the life of a carnival performer or that of an outsider whose life is rife with carnival metaphor. For instance, “The Two-Headed Woman and the Two-Faced Man” is both literal and metaphorical. Naturally, she draws carnival audiences, and as an outsider and illusionist of sorts, he complicates her life.
Through deft, incisive portraits, Lesley Dauer populates these pages with people and animals in whom we recognize our own strengths, quirks, and bewilderment. We meet among others: a human cannonball preoccupied with thoughts of his family’s welfare, a contortionist controlled by his emotions, and compassionate dancing bears concerned by the psychological limits of their audience.
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P548
ISBN: 9780881466232
Price: $17.00
Christian Bend isn’t the kind of place where one expects to find the sorts of secrets the widow Burdy Luttrell has been harboring. Tucked in the hills of East Tennessee, Christian Bend is a place of piercing beauty, where the rivers and love run constant. Burdy never could bring herself to tell Rain Hurd the truth about his father. She’d always meant to, but put it off until that day she was nearly killed in the shooting at Bean Station. As soon as he heard about the shooting, Rain left his job in Rhode Island and flew to Burdy’s bedside at that Knoxville hospital. That’s when Burdy told him about the letters.
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H810
ISBN: 9780881462111
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $25.00
Interweaving his memories of boyhood Christmases in the dark days of the Depression and the details of present-day holidays with his grandchildren, Ferrol Sams demonstrates the deep, inescapable role of rituals in our lives and the importance of passing them on to each succeeding generation. Includes audio CD read by the author.
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P617
ISBN: 9780881467772
Price: $16.00
In his thirteenth collection of poetry, Jack B. Bedell examines moments of reparation and continuance in the face of loss. By turns personal, ecological, cultural, and fantastic, these poems promise new maps to navigate damaged territories. The rituals of family and South Louisiana culture share space with folklore and history here.
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P660
ISBN: 9780881468717
Price: $20.00
John Lane continues his exploration of the intersection of the human imagination with the world of other animals. Each of these fifteen pieces--some more formal essays, some journalism, and some stories of Lane's encounters with wild animals in wild places--explores the diversity and the mystery of what's often been called "the more than human world."
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P480
ISBN: 9780881464702
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $18.00
In 1976, Joseph Bathanti left his home in Pittsburgh for a fourteen- month sojourn as a VISTA Volunteer with the North Carolina Department of Correction.
His new volume of poems, CONCERTINA, recounts in lyrical sweep his entry into the surreal, brutal, and often terrifyingly beautiful netherworld of convicts and their keepers. It is a world with one foot still firmly planted in the old chain gang, the other venturing beyond the manacles of history into a realm of second chances, while the country, in the throes of its bicentennial celebration, still swoons from Watergate and its aftermath.
What’s more, CONCERTINA, is an outsider’s meditation on the American South and the power of place to transform not only language, but to instill in the speaker the impulse to tell the story of everything his eye lights upon. Indeed, Bathanti’s world is as much about the geography, the very ether, of North Carolina, as it is about prisons. His voice is contemplative, poised on a tightrope of its own making, pitched near detonation.
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P512
ISBN: 9780881465372
Price: $17.00
Within the tightly knit Cherokee community in the Smoky Mountains, a secret society of Snake Dancers is led by a group of elders, four of whom guard an artifact of incredible power. Guardianship has been passed from father to son for over 300 years. Theses artifacts belonged to Kanegwa’ti, a medicine man who controlled the power of Uktena (an evil spirit) in order to protect the tribe. Even the four guardians cannot reveal what they guard. The tradition of secrecy was set up by Kanegwa’ti to prevent anyone from awakening Uktena and bringing destruction.
|