Literary

In the fifty years since her death, Flannery O’Connor studies have been conventionally delimited to two critical parameters: the South and the Church of Rome. This work challenges the conception of O’Connor as inherent to a monolithic South and to orthodox Roman Catholicism by problematizing the “Southern Gothic” trope, positing a non-canonical Southern realism, and repositioning O’Connor as essentially ecumenical in her private theology. The study contextualizes O’Connor’s work within the American scene by detailing the varied political and literary histories of the “North” and “South” as well as opposing the notion of region-specific aesthetics and a native anti-realist mode in the South.

Moving and filled with unexpected ideas and imagery, The Color of All Things is a love letter from one man to one woman, but it offers love from each of us to all of us. Brimming with a touching and generous joy, this is a book of everyday needs that can only be filled with a genuine and lasting love. This is the third volume of poetry from Philip Lee Williams, following on his Elegies for the Water and his national book of the year (Books and Culture magazine) The Flower Seeker: An Epic Poem of William Bartram. Like his other volumes of poetry, The Color of All Things moves slowly through the natural world without sentimentality but with surefooted grace and lovely rhythms. Georgia poet laureate Judson Mitcham says that in Williams’s poetry we hear “the distinctive voice of a poet who knows how to tell the stories that matter, how to hold still and take a good look at the natural world and let himself be filled with praise, a poet who knows how to find the right prayer and how to pray it.”