Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P528
ISBN: 9780881465716
Price: $17.00
Each poem in this award-winning collection represents the life of a carnival performer or that of an outsider whose life is rife with carnival metaphor. For instance, “The Two-Headed Woman and the Two-Faced Man” is both literal and metaphorical. Naturally, she draws carnival audiences, and as an outsider and illusionist of sorts, he complicates her life.
Through deft, incisive portraits, Lesley Dauer populates these pages with people and animals in whom we recognize our own strengths, quirks, and bewilderment. We meet among others: a human cannonball preoccupied with thoughts of his family’s welfare, a contortionist controlled by his emotions, and compassionate dancing bears concerned by the psychological limits of their audience.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P443
ISBN: 9780881462722
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $15.00
Going Farther into the Woods than the Woods Go opens with the poet speaking from an interior landscape in which life is going too fast and he is lonely and isolated from himself and others. Life is brutal, and the speaker finds himself constantly questioning his self-worth, yet in a surrealistic, witty fashion perhaps best described as black humor.
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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: 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: 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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Product Code: P478
ISBN: 9780881464696
Product Format: Paperback
Availability: Not currently available. ( Backorder policy)
Price: $16.00
Swift Hour opens with an epigraph from a Leonard Cohen song, “I hope you’re keeping some kind of record.” Like Cohen, Sexton is looking for the crack in everything that lets the light in, but even more urgent is the recording of these moments. Life is quickly passing, but along the way, relics are harvested for safekeeping. Her work reminds us how in some ways myth and knowledge itself help us to navigate through the shadows toward the light.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P503
ISBN: 9780881465235
Price: $18.00
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.”
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P561
ISBN: 9780881466522
Price: $16.00
In her first collection of poems, Sara Pirkle Hughes explores the role memory plays in shaping identity and a person’s perception of the past. The book’s title, THE DISAPPEARING ACT, posits that time is a magician causing every moment in a person's life to disappear, and every poem in the collection is the poet's attempt to recapture what has vanished, while also acknowledging the inherent paradox of writing about the past. The fallible nature of memory makes it impossible to preserve an experience free of distortion.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P453
ISBN: 9780881463903
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $16.00
Winner of the 2011 Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry The House Began to Pitch is a collection of poems that begins by following the lives of a man and a woman who grow up in the rural South in the fifties and sixties. Many of the poems are told through the lens of fairy tales as a comment on archetypal constructs that make up our ideals of home and family.
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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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