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.
|
Product Code: P491
ISBN: 9780881464962
Price: $18.00
In her tenth collection, Catharine Savage Brosman's singular voice is heard again as she develops themes featured in her earlier work and adds new ones, displaying her full range of poetic craftsmanship and style and, as one critic wrote, using "metaphors brilliantly fitted in detail to the moods and workings of the human heart and mind." A prefatory poem, "To Readers," uses the figure of trees to emphasize the truth, beauty, mystery, and autonomy of poetry. Yet it is clear that in Brosman's work the art of verse is closely connected to human experience, the very feel of which comes through in the poems that follow.
|
Product Code: H898
ISBN: 9780881465143
Price: $25.00
In her tenth collection, Catharine Savage Brosman's singular voice is heard again as she develops themes featured in her earlier work and adds new ones, displaying her full range of poetic craftsmanship and style and, as one critic wrote, using "metaphors brilliantly fitted in detail to the moods and workings of the human heart and mind." A prefatory poem, "To Readers," uses the figure of trees to emphasize the truth, beauty, mystery, and autonomy of poetry. Yet it is clear that in Brosman's work the art of verse is closely connected to human experience, the very feel of which comes through in the poems that follow.
|
Product Code: H899
ISBN: 9780881465198
Price: $25.00
Death, and the Day’s Light, the volume of poetry James Dickey was working on when he died, offers the writer’s final views on love and death, fathers and sons, and war and resurrection. This volume constitutes an invaluable addition to the canon of a major American poet and allows for a complete understanding of his oeuvre.
|
Product Code: P501
ISBN: 9780881465204
Price: $18.00
William Wright’s eighth collection of poems is an expansive personal journey that includes poems about subjects as varied as a farm woman forsaken by her husband, yellow jackets, insomnia, a mountain witch, salt marshes, a ditch filled with rainwater, and even a post-apocalyptic portrait of the last person on Earth. Beginning with “Prologue,” a piece that embeds a kaleidoscopic, novel-like vision of a small agricultural town and a few of its inhabitants, these poems capture the exterior world and recontextualize its many forms through a dreamlike logic, harnessing radiant imagery and strong aural texture through lines and words that stir both mind and heart. Here, Wright reveals how the most luminous forms often dwell in even the darkest subjects and images.
|
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.”
|
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.
|
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.
|
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.
|
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.
|
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.
|
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…”
|