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: P428
ISBN: 9780881462418
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $20.00
Abandoned Quarry publishes for the first time in a trade edition Lane’s poems from Quarries, As the World Around us Sleeps, Against Information & Other Poems, The Dead Father Poems, Noble Trees, and other chapbooks, broadsides, and little magazines. Mostly out of print, or simply unavailable except in rare book collections, the selection of poems in Abandoned Quarry shows the growth and fullness of spirit of one of the important Southern poets to emerge in the 1980s.
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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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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: 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: P521
ISBN: 9780881465501
Price: $16.00
FIREFLIES is a collection of lyric poems—formal and informal— that seek solace in nature and memory for the heartache of being human.
From children chasing fireflies at night to middle agers chasing lost loves at three in the morning, they trace the compromises we make to make it—the dead mice, cats, fetuses, and loves left in our wakes. And they celebrate the tenuous survival of trees, love, and innocence.
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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: P678
ISBN: 9780881469066
Price: $20.00
Through the redemptive power of words, OLD GODS confronts personal battles of addiction, autism, heartbreak, otherness, anxiety, and escapism through journey poems.
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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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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: HH1022
ISBN: 9780881468328
Price: $22.00
Cathryn Hankla's tenth collection, NOT XANADU, confronts the recurring imprint of the past--culturally, environmentally, and personally. In innovative poems that reclaim and reinvent traditional forms, reversing haikus and truncating sonnets, Hankla's recognition of resonance and presence evolves as a runner moves through a familiarly strange landscape evoking memory without evading keen observation. The poet reminds us that things are not what they seem on the surface or at first glance.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P663
ISBN: 9780881468755
Price: $20.00
This third collection of Kevin Cantwell's poetry is characterized less by formalism than by the lyric poem as an exploration of the process of making art. Intimate poems from family life give pointed texture to the more meditative encounters within the paragraphing of longer stanzas.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P619
ISBN: 9780881467796
Price: $16.00
This debut collection braids together published and new poems into a lyrical album quilt of stories and scenes. Wryly funny, earthy, susceptible to river shoals, hymns, old tools, and favorite shirts, these poems refuse to waste their troubles. The potential blessings and losses in fathering, in having sick friends, in acts of faith, in the work of marriage, and in risking everything from minor surgery to gutting trout in grizzly country give these poems tension, drama, and a wry, grateful humanity.
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