Bøger i Southern Messenger Poets serien

"Useless Virtues", T. R. Hummer's seventh book of poetry, is a wide-ranging series of forays into metaphysical territory. Its presiding inquiry concerns the dependency of our consciousness and our spirit on the untrustworthy powers of language.

A woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. The most personal of Claudia Emerson's poetry collections, Late Wife is both an elegy and a celebration of a rich present informed by a complex past.

Celebrated poet Julie Kane returns to her Boston Irish Catholic roots in this collection about mothers and daughters shaped by the forces of Irish history and Irish-American culture. Kane confronts how the legacy of personal trauma gets passed down to subsequent generations, with a focus on women from her family history.

From poems of memory and family through its extraordinary voyaging sequences "Via Appia" and "To Ithaca", Ron Smith's Moon Road embodies the experiences and some of the more elusive lessons of marriage, fatherhood, teaching, sports, and travel.

The title of Ron Smith's new collection comes from Yeats's observation that creators "must go from desire to weariness and so to desire again, and live but for the moment when vision comes to our weariness like terrible lightning, in the humility of the brutes."

At ease equally in poetry and prose, David Huddle is an immensely talented writer esteemed for his shrewd powers of observation, ear for authentic voices, and ability to set forth painful truth with stunning effect. Summer Lake is a beautifully coherent compilation of Huddle's best poetry to date.

In these fifty-five poems that compose Late Leisure, Eleanor Ross Taylor shares dramatic, symbolic, intensely personal outpourings of her evolving consciousness, "myself capriciously ongoing", as poet, woman, and elder.

A second collection of autobiographical "memory poems" by David Kirby. Kirby confides in narrative poems the events he actually or vicariously experienced - as a child, a teen, a young man - as well as some future scenes he imagines. Little Richard, Henry James and others all feature.

The scariest sentence in the English language is brief, threatening, and hopeful. It is deceptive, simple, and as common as water: anything is possible. This second collection by Steve Scafidi is haunted by the possible and "the bells of the verb to be" that "ring-a-ding-ding calling us / to the holy dark of this first / warm night of Spring."

T.R. Hummer's new and characteristically pyrotechnic collection takes its title from the rare (in English) singular form of the common word "ephemera". In a work of startling originality, the poet presents a meditation on ephemerality from the point of view of the ephemeron itself as it passes, be it the individual, the atom, the particle.

An account of spiritual survival through the practice of literary art, the poems in David Huddle's eighth collection, Dream Sender, move among a variety of poetic forms and voices. By turns outrageous and pragmatic, Huddle's poems acknowledge the powerful and disturbing currents of the contemporary world.

Spiraling between the tenses of time, David Huddle creates in these vibrant poems a defense against the encroachment of age through the resources of language and memory, imagination and art. Moments recollected, and admittedly embellished, from his own life and family seem appealingly familiar.

In this eloquent long poem, Claudia Emerson employs the voices of two family members on a small southern farm to examine the universal complexities of place, generation, memory, and identity.

Long-lined and often laugh-aloud funny, Kirby's poems are ample steamer trunks into which the poet seems to be able to put just about anything-the heated restlessness of youth, the mixed blessings of self-imposed exile, the settled pleasures of home. As the poet Philip Levine says, "the world that Kirby takes into his imagination and the one that arises from it merge to become a creation like no other, something like the world we inhabit but funnier and more full of wonder and terror. He has evolved a poetic vision that seems able to include anything, and when he lets it sweep him across the face of Europe and America, the results are astonishing." The poems in The House on Boulevard St. were written within earshot of David Kirby's Old World masters, Shakespeare and Dante. From the former, Kirby takes the compositional method of organizing not only the whole book but also each separate section as a dream; from the latter, a three-part scheme that gives the book rough symmetry.

A bold, brassy, yet delicate vision of a woman's growth. Imbued with a unique poetic voice that is utterly feminist, these poems possess a fiery intensity for those abuses no woman can ever quite recover from, but also reveal the loving, forgiving temperament of the mother no woman can do without.

Through silence and song, death and rebirth, a sense of wonder pervades every minute of our lives. In The Man Who Saws Us in Half, Ron Houchin explores this idea from the first curiosities of childhood to the gradual skepticism that comes with age and the weight of practical concerns.

The percussive poems of Stripper in Wonderland move from birth to death, funk to hip-hop, and racism to religion as Derrick Harriell explores the life of a modern black man transplanted from the American Midwest to the Deep South.

Sometimes a fact swings down like a hammer and we are changed. The fact of loss, the fact of desire, and all the wild, unruly facts of history hammer down and sparks fly up. This, then, is a collection of facts.