Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P579
ISBN: 9780881467000
Price: $18.00
Homer sends the hero of THE ODYSSEY to interview the dead in order to discover his destiny. The poems of R. T. Smith’s SUMMONING SHADES pursue a similar mission, bringing to life in monologues and narratives figures from history and recollection, all rendered with careful attention to the idiom, customs, emotions, and ironies of their time and region.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P581
ISBN: 9780881467024
Price: $17.00
THROUGH THE NEEDLE'S EYE is told through the authentic voice of Jessie, a precocious girl raised in the Blue Ridge Foothills of Southern Appalachia after World War II. Saddled with an alcoholic narcissistic father and a passive mother, Jessie is charged with mothering her siblings as generational curses and poverty never cease to overwhelm her family. As providence would have it, Granny Isabelle sets her eagle eye upon Jessie, the child neither parents nor teachers think worthwhile.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P601
ISBN: 9780881467352
Price: $16.00
In his third book of poetry, William Woolfitt reflects on experiences of hope and despair, on ecological crisis and violence and stubborn survival, on Lucille Clifton's imperative to "bloom how you must" and on Gerard Manley Hopkins' vision of a grandeur-charged world. Set in Appalachia, Costa Rica, Afghanistan, Newfoundland, Mali, and elsewhere, SPRING UP EVERLASTING attempts to listen to and learn from the stories of people who have resisted the destruction and desecration of their environments, families, homes, and bodies.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P612
ISBN: 9780881467574
Price: $18.00
Fifteen-year-old Lucas Webster doesn't mind working in the fields and chopping cotton on his grandparents' farm in South Georgia, but he hates getting stuck caring for his Uncle Robert who was born with Down Syndrome. After his grandpa dies in the spring of 1948, things change. His grandmother withdraws in her grief and Alvin Earl, Robert's half-brother, returns to manage the farm with his guns and stash of liquor. Despite Lucas's objections, Alvin Earl plans to pull him out of school to work on the farm full-time and send Robert to the state asylum.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P616
ISBN: 9780881467765
Price: $16.00
Born and raised in Ohio, Shuly Xóchitl Cawood moved to the South over two decades ago and has also lived and traveled in her mother's native country of Mexico. She writes about all of these places in her debut poetry collection, TROUBLE CAN BE SO BEAUTIFUL AT THE BEGINNING, using their landscape and culture as a backdrop and a contrast to consider her identity and what it means to migrate from one location to another, how a place's values and societal expectations can shape who you are and who you become, and how you can be both a part of something and apart from it.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P648
ISBN: 9780881468540
Price: $17.00
WHERE YOU COME FROM IS GONE examines the economic and racial violence of rural America, where whiteness is a fraught and often dysfunctional identity. It is a poetic attempt at a "blues line" or a bluegrass "breakdown" to embody a lush, dangerous, and often damaged American landscape as well as the resilience of the human spirit in the face of blunt labor and white supremacy.
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