Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H935
ISBN: 9780881466188
Price: $26.00
A MAN'S WORLD is a collection of 20 profiles of fascinating men by author and magazine writer Steve Oney. Written over a 40-year period for publications including Esquire, Premiere, GQ, Time, Los Angeles, and The Atlanta Journal & Constitution Magazine, the stories bring to life the famous (Harrison Ford), the brilliant (Robert Penn Warren), the tortured (Gregg Allman), and the unknown (Chris Leon, a 20-year-old Marine Corps corporal killed in the Iraq war). Several of the articles are prize winners. “The Talented Mr. Raywood” won the City and Regional Magazine Association Award for best profile in an American city magazine. “Herschel Walker Doesn’t Tap Out” won the Chicago Headline Club’s Peter Lisagor Award for best magazine sports story. “Hollywood Fixer” won the Los Angeles Press Club Award for best magazine profile. “The Casualty of War” was a finalist for Columbia University’s National Magazine Award.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P541
ISBN: 9780881465976
Price: $18.00
Frannie Lewis has a lot of bad history with men, starting with the first one she ever met. She’s watched her aloof father disappear in the summers to work with a traveling carnival, seen her mother grow ever more suspicious and resentful. All her life, Frannie has kept their secrets and told their stories. Now thirty-six, she remains a pawn in their longstanding marital chess game—and at this point, it has devolved into a grudge match.
Even so, she longs to be a mother. Motherhood seems like a chance to reinvent what it means to be a family—to rectify her childhood, to start fresh. Still single, she isn’t sure if this will ever happen. When her father is diagnosed with cancer, she decides to have a baby on her own to encourage him to live and to please her mother, who still grieves over the baby she lost twenty-five years ago.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P543
ISBN: 9780881466140
Price: $16.00
The moving targets of identity are not always dramatic or final. SHARPS CABARET brings us ex-expatriate poems. They enter—in one way or another—once-familiar territory. Here, when re-crossing oceans, streets, supermarket aisles, or exam rooms, the trip is always a trip. Something is always at stake.
In SHARPS CABARET, Giebenhain handles the underestimated and overlooked with good-natured force. From horseshoe-pitching in a war zone to Mary the Mother of God speaking from an icon, from reading graffiti in a Prague restaurant to American health insurers acting like highway bandits, from the startling cleanliness of German windows to the introduction of the patron saint of the world’s most confusingly-named disease, here’s a collection that urges us to look again.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P545
ISBN: 9780881466164
Price: $16.00
As the opening poem “The Labyrinth Galaxy” suggests, this is not a book of astronomy, but a book of seeking and beseeching. Cathryn Hankla’s GALAXIES forms a collective of connected but disparate things. Each galaxy grouping constitutes a gravitational system of concern, finding its own music and approach to what a poem can be. Together the poems create a spiritual pilgrimage, a sequence sending up an alarm for the earth, inviting the reader to walk a path to the heart’s center.
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By composer: Doc Schneider
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P546
ISBN: 9780881466201
Price: $45.00
In words and music, songs and photographs, this captivating songbook tells the story of a mostly unknown homemade singer-songwriter. A lawyer by day and night, and a songwriter in between, Doc Schneider has written more than 100 songs over the last four decades and released three albums--Choices & Chances, Second Chances, and Songs & Stories Live--all available through iTunes, CD Baby, YouTube, Spotify, and Pandora. His songs have found a few dedicated listeners across the United States and in tiny pockets around the world in Bruges, Paris, Malta, and elsewhere.
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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.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P549
ISBN: 9780881466256
Price: $17.00
In the story of the earth, geologists tell us that around 12,000 years ago the planet shifted from the Pleistocene to the Holocene. There probably were poets to sing about that change, but of what they sang, we have no records. Even earlier, paintings on cave walls point toward an artistic response from our upstart species. These early artists painted the Pleistocene’s last great ice age herds thundering past. Now John Lane’s traveling geologist sings a dawning epoch’s blues. The Anthropocene is upon us, and his poems show how humans believe they have become “the planet’s boss, the big chief, the emperor of air, diesel fuel,/bow thrusters, and tax shelters…”
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P551
ISBN: 9780881466300
Price: $17.00
Catharine Savage Brosman’s singular and authoritative voice, familiar to poetry readers in the South since the late 1960s, is heard again as she brings to scenes and topics, both new and familiar, her broad range of craftsmanship and styles, using, as one critic wrote, “metaphors brilliantly fitted in detail to the moods and workings of the human heart and mind.” Her poetic practice shows how closely the art of verse can, and must, be connected to human experience, the very feel of which comes through in the poems here. The book features travel poems from four continents, rhymed lyrics on small or expansive topics, narratives in blank verse (concerning El Cid, Swift, Dickens, Charles Dodgson, Saint-Exupéry, and two women writers), five translations from Baudelaire (among the least-known poems), and satires concerning painting and publishing. Recurring themes include “great age” and death, friendship, piano playing, flowers and gardens, and the desert.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P553
ISBN: 9780881466386
Price: $20.00
Michael McFee’s new book takes its title from the unofficial motto of the US Postal Service: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” All of us have appointed rounds in our lives--essential things we are given to do and must try to complete, whatever the inner or outer weather, whenever the time of day or night, however we may approach those duties. This lively and wide-ranging collection of fifty essays--many of them pointed, a page or so, addresses McFee’s appointed rounds, subjects he has been thinking and caring about for decades.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H951
ISBN: 9780881466577
Price: $28.00
"When the bullets start flying, I hope the first one gets you." The man in the crosshairs was the author's father. It was an era of seismic social change in the American South. Four decades later, his son visited the National September 11 Museum. In a young firefighter's heroism on 9/11, the author glimpsed a truth about his father's lifelong devotion to duty, law, and justice. So he sat down and began writing him letters. THE BURDENS OF AENEAS is that series of letters--a fascinating collection of wide-ranging essays, invented conversations, reminiscences, interior monologues, and vivid descriptions of life in a vanishing America. Part memoir, part extended reflection on paternal duty and love, it breaks new ground in blending deeply personal writing with scholarly meditation on a masterwork of world literature, Virgil's AENEID.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P557
ISBN: 9780881466478
Price: $17.00
In this brief illustrated guide to the national monument located in Macon, Georgia, that conserves ancient Mississippian mounds and 12,000 years of human presence along the Ocmulgee River, Matthew Jennings and Gordon Johnston, introduce readers to the park's history, archaeology, Native cultures, and landscape. This new guide braids into Jennings's concise historical overview Gordon Johnston's field notes and poems, written while Johnston was writer-in-residence at Ocmulgee National Monument.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P558
ISBN: 9780881466485
Price: $20.00
Founded in fieldwork and reflection, LOST PLACES follows the author from small towns and rural landscapes, through a transitional city neighborhood, to the challenging construction of an urban renewal loft, as she struggles to renovate living spaces and transform relationships after an early divorce. In a voice droll and lyrical by turns, Hankla charts a path through enigmatic encounters with snakes and contemplations of Thomas Jefferson's problematic biography homes, underground and ancient cities, Star Trek, the contradictory nature of Appalachia, desire, our families, spiritual callings, and definitions of home.
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