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: P540
ISBN: 9780881465969
Price: $16.00
In May of 1964, eleven-year-old Etta McDaniel’s horse is struck by lightning—dead and gone, she hopes— out of her life “as though he’d never come in the first place, bringing with him one catastrophe after another.” But Troy, gruesomely scarred, not only survives but seems to have gained supernatural powers, which Etta sets her mind on harnessing in her search for treasure. She is convinced that a find of the sort her hero Heinrich Schliemann unearthed at ancient Troy will set to rights everything suddenly gone wrong in her life: rivalry and betrayal at home and social unrest reaching even her family’s farm.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P544
ISBN: 9780881466157
Price: $18.00
Part memoir, part essay collection, part spiritual journal, THIS GLADDENING LIGHT offers a unique perspective on the interconnectedness of universal themes--doubt and devotion, childhood and parenthood, disconnection and ecological mindfulness, anguish and empathy--all told at the level of the ground.
This much-anticipated nonfiction debut from Christopher Martin is, ultimately, a work of belonging. Through narrative prose that moves between a rain-soaked Appalachian cove, Thoreau’s hut site at Walden Pond, hospital rooms in Atlanta and Cherokee County, Civil War battlefields crossed by highways, and the suburbanized, ore-red hills of Northwest Georgia, Martin paints a spirituality of the ordinary, of the creaturely world.
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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: P560
ISBN: 9780881466515
Price: $17.00
DIXIE LUCK features stories about hardy gamblers, look-on-the-bright-side salesmen, and other brands of optimistic Southerners. The stories are set in locales from Hot Springs, Arkansas, to the Atlantic Coast; each city or town seems to hold its own version of good fortune. The collection also includes the Faulkner Award-winning novella TERMINAL, a tale that finds a husband and wife reuniting in hopes of finding one final cash-out at the windows. The stories are literary--they study characters who try to stay honest and upbeat in the face of stacked odds.
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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: 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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