Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P468
ISBN: 9780881464474
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $18.00
These poems, written over a period of thirty years, reflect both the experience of growing up and growing old.
The poems seek to find a primitive connection to a natural world that is fast disappearing. They look at what is lost and what is still present, though ignored, in twenty-first-century life.
The familiar subjects of love, death, disaster, discovery, grief, loss, and joy are explored; but the underlying power that keeps emerging lies in the need to rely on images that try to speak a language that cannot be spoken, of music/rhythm to enter that familiar place of the heart, and of a river, the Tennessee River, that drives the heart of this poet.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P469
ISBN: 9780881464481
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $17.00
“Maizee Hurd was an easy target for hard times,” according to Burdy Luttrell, the town healer. Burdy is a Melungeon woman with striking features and mysterious ways. She owns the land the Hurds leased following their marriage on June 3, 1940.
Maizee moved upriver at the age of ten after tragedy struck, and she was sent off to be raised by a childless aunt and her doctor husband. Shortly after Maizee’s ferry boat arrival in the rural mountain community of Christian Bend—carrying only a small suitcase, her mama’s Bible, and her doll Hitty—the young girl began hearing the voices that would continue to torment her.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P470
ISBN: 9780881464498
Price: $20.00
Alexander Smith stated that a good essayist needed “an ability to discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things.” Arthur Benson seconded the idea, saying an essayist needed a “far-ranging curiosity.” For three decades Sam Pickering has written essays, his words rolling in a fine frenzy over ordinary life discovering the marvelous and the absurd. His curiosity ranges, but it also rumpuses and rollicks. He wanders the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee, rural Connecticut, farmland in Nova Scotia, and islands in the sun. Strangers tell him their life stories—tales that are almost as odd as the fictional characters he meets. He runs half-marathons and wins prizes, but finishes so late in the day that he misses award ceremonies. His good friend David tells him, “Sam, if you weren’t so damn smart, you would have been a great success.”
Add smiles and laughter, a smidgen of melancholy, and a pinch or two of happy lies, and you have Pickering the essayist.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P476
ISBN: 9780881464641
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $18.00
MEMEORY"S MIST is a collection of personal essays about life in the South as seen through the eyes of author Jackie K. Cooper. The stories contained hold up a mirror upon which the shared traits and experiences of life can be seen. Some of the experiences shared are humorous, some are sad, some are dramatic, and some are life affirming. Through them all runs a ribbon of hope and optimism. As Cooper reflects back on his past, the vision has been somewhat dimmed by the mist of memory but—with the help of family and friends—he is able to part the mist and have a clear view of the past which in many ways signals the future. As with his other books Cooper finds life full of surprises and simple joys amid the tumultuous and uncertain lives we all live.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P477
ISBN: 9780881464658
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $18.00
The poems in DECEMBERS have been written, usually one a year, beginning in 1973 when the author moved from the South to New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, where he took a job teaching creative writing at Westminster College. They are written to accompany the Christmas cards he and his wife Jane write each year to keep in touch with friends from college, graduate school, and earlier jobs.
These poems arise out of memory, both of the author and those of others. In them Perkins is much more interested in the images of the season, the sights, the sounds, the scents, the textures, and the tastes than he is in the abstractions: joy, love, warmth, gratitude, etc. He is more interested in what the season is than in what it means.
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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.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H880
ISBN: 9780881464733
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $25.00
HALF OF WHAT I SAY IS MEANINGLESS is a series of memoirs, set by turns in Joseph Bathanti’s hometown of Pittsburgh as well as in his ultimate home in North Carolina where he landed in 1976 as a VISTA Volunteer assigned to the North Carolina Department of Correction. Though these essays are not queued chronologically, they form a seamless chronicle of contemplation on the indelible stamp of home, family, ancestry, and spirituality, regardless of locale.
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Product Code: P484
ISBN: 9780881464825
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $20.00
For five heart-churning days, the world turns its attention to tiny Pridemore, Missouri, where rescue teams work around the clock to free a mentally challenged man from a collapsed cave. That’s how Mayor Roe Tolliver envisions it, anyway. Weary of watching the town he’s led for more than forty years slide into economic oblivion, the mayor hatches a devious and dangerous plan. Get ready for a fast-paced romp filled with quirky characters, hilarious twists and turns, and a small town that just might get its fifteen minutes of fame.
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Product Code: H885
ISBN: 9780881464788
Price: $29.00
Ethics for Steinbeck always entailed justice. This didn’t change over the course of his long career.
Justice is constituted of a communal spirit, a relational situation in which individual humans care for their fellows, and a state that champions the cause of the needy and outcast. Any violation merits punishment if incurred by an individual or rebellion if incurred by the state. Upon such points as these most Steinbeck readers agree.
What hasn’t been done before, however, and what SEARCHING FOR EDEN undertakes, is a careful analysis of how these ideas fluctuated at different points during Steinbeck’s literary career. Of utmost importance here are the latter years of Steinbeck’s life when his deepening political involvement and immersion in Arthurian myth shaped a changing ethic altogether.
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Product Code: H896
ISBN: 9780881464917
Price: $24.00
Perhaps it was a sense of estrangement from the everyday that drew Cynthia Sorrel to the village of Cooper Patent. The failed painter was lured by the gatehouse with its seven doors, the lake with its tower, and the magical air of a place that couldn't quite decide whether it was fictional, mythic, or real. The gatehouse should have been a first clue that she was on a journey, and soon she begins to glimpse and then to pursue a figure in the woods near her house, convinced she has seen the Muse.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H886
ISBN: 9780881464931
Price: $29.00
Filled with colorful details and rich with photographs of the author's life, It Is Written is a beautifully written page-turner about how one person turns the raw materials of life into art.
Over a thirty-year career as a published author of fiction, poetry, and essays, Philip Lee Williams has become one of the South's most-honored writers. Now, Williams tells the story of his creative life in an open, jaunty, and often hilarious autobiography.
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Product Code: P491
ISBN: 9780881464962
Price: $18.00
In her tenth collection, Catharine Savage Brosman's singular voice is heard again as she develops themes featured in her earlier work and adds new ones, displaying her full range of poetic craftsmanship and style and, as one critic wrote, using "metaphors brilliantly fitted in detail to the moods and workings of the human heart and mind." A prefatory poem, "To Readers," uses the figure of trees to emphasize the truth, beauty, mystery, and autonomy of poetry. Yet it is clear that in Brosman's work the art of verse is closely connected to human experience, the very feel of which comes through in the poems that follow.
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