Featured Books
The Texas Review 37.1&2
Spring/Summer 2016
In Memory of Paul Ruffin (1941-2016)
"All it took with Paul Ruffin was one meeting, one face-to-face encounter, and you would always remember him. Always. That is how it is with legends." ~karla k Morton, 2010 Texas Poet Laureate
The Texas Review 37.1&2
Spring/Summer 2016
In Memory of Paul Ruffin (1941-2016)
"All it took with Paul Ruffin was one meeting, one face-to-face encounter, and you would always remember him. Always. That is how it is with legends." ~karla k Morton, 2010 Texas Poet Laureate
My Mother’s House
by David Armand
A haunting memoir from the author of Harlow . . .
Set in the bucolic, yet brutal South of his youth, My Mother’s House is a memoir by novelist David Armand. It recounts the young author’s early memories of being born to a schizophrenic mother, then given up for adoption, only to be raised in a home with an alcoholic and abusive step-father. In this sharply-remembered portrait of the people and places that shaped him, Armand paints his seemingly negative experiences with a sympathetic and understanding brush. As the reader follows Armand through his childhood and later into adult life—when he is reunited with his mother after she makes a failed suicide attempt—a surprisingly new world of hope and possibility is rendered, despite the overwhelming challenges of this reunion.
American Originals
by Tracy Daugherty
The novellas and stories in American Originals convey the power of the West Texas desert to swallow people—literally, or through the rituals of labor, or through the raptures of ecstatic vision, induced by blessings or madness—and people’s ability to forge connections in spite of extreme conditions. Each piece in this thematically-linked collection assumes a unique shape, whether poetically compressed, echoing (only to break) the contours of mystery stories, or redolent of the forms of classical prayer. The Texas of American Originals becomes the landscape of strife and hope, struggle and love, lost and found.
The characters in the stories and novellas here learn, sometimes the hard way, the truth of T. S. Eliot’s insight that the "end of all our exploring" in life is to "arrive where we started" and to know, for the first time, who we really are. Saints and sinners, and the blurred lines between them, drive these spare narratives set in the plains and deserts of Texas.
Flowers for the Living
by Sandra E. Johnson
A riveting story of how a suicidal African American teenager’s forcing a young white cop to kill him devastates the teenager’s mother as well the rookie cop. It also sparks a massive race riot and puts the mother and rookie in the crosshairs of a deranged gunman.
The only place Emma Jennings, the mother, and Russell "Rusty" Carter, Jr., the cop, find refuge from the chaos engulfing them is the teenager’s serenely beautiful grave. Through initially awkward meetings there, Emma and Rusty establish a bond that they must ultimately rely on to rebuild their lives and help heal their city.
The Pigeons of Buchenau and Other Stories
by David R. Pichaske
Pichaske’s stories take us from the halls of academe to small-town Minnesota to a little village on the edge of the Bavarian National Forest. Speaking in voices of a farmer right out of Deliverance, a disgruntled professor of English, and his dog Harley, Pichaske says what many people think, but few have the courage to say. While he is especially strong on details of history, place, and language, the hard-nosed wisdom his narrators offer transcends place and even time.
From "Daisy":Look—there are always dreams. And in dreams the ultimate purity: by now she may be fat and forty, stretch marks, grey hair, three kids. The ravages of time, you know? Look at you and me: not exactly the bright and rising stars we were twenty years ago, eh? But in dreams, the years are invisible. People never age in dreams.
Best Creative Nonfiction of the South
Volume I: Virginia
edited by Casey Clabough and Thorpe Moeckel
Best Creative Nonfiction of the South, of which this Virginia collection is the first volume, serves as a valuable resource for scholars, students, writers, and general readers interested in creative nonfiction both from specific areas of the South and across the region as a whole. The writers included in each volume come from diverse backgrounds, generations, and artistic traditions. Most, if not all, volumes in the series indirectly reflect literary changes over time and/or how literary variations have manifested themselves in a given state. In some cases, publisher permissions and other factors have foiled the editors from including the work of deserving writers. Nevertheless, the abundant literary talent across the South has lessened the impact of the occasional unfortunate omission.
Accidental Origami
by karla k morton
This book features Morton’s best work to date from her ten collections. While her poems range in style, topic and region, they capture each universal emotion, delving into our desire to know our place in this world; the reason for our very being. Her words are comfort and wonder and hope. She writes: This is a book of poems to swallow, to seep in your bloodstream/ and pound open the chamber doors/ of your own heart, reminding us of our huge capacity for love, guiding us through each tiny fold of synchronicity to discover the big picture--what it means to truly be alive.
Pastoral Habits
by George Drew
Just as an orchard grower, when harvesting its fruit, discards the tart, the bitter, the overripe and the stunted, so, too, any poet tries to judiciously reject less than sterling poems when assembling his Selected. Pastoral
Habits is a selection of carefully chosen poems from fifty years and five volumes of poetic harvests. If "pastoral" connotes good shepherding, or good harvesting, then George Drew’s collection will resonate for those who value the worlds of poetry
Barrier Island Suite
by Kendall Dunkelberg
The poems of Barrier Island Suite are inspired by the life, art, and writings of Walter Inglis Anderson, who spent much of his adult life exploring the barrier islands of Mississippi, sketching and painting their flora and fauna, and chronicling his adventures in numerous logs. The islands form a liminal space between the land and sea, between nature and culture, between madness and conformity. Elements of Anderson’s life, including his travels, his struggles with mental illness, and his murals are also incorporated
The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals
by Stephen Gibson
The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals ranges across time and place in visiting personal as well as historical and even imagined experience. As an abecedarian was once used to teach the basics of a thing—say, to recognize an alphabet—Gibson, who has labelled his collection a "scrambled abecedarian," suggests that all meaning arises out of disorder. However, it is from this disorder that the varied subjects of the poems are shaped into a significance.
This Shaky Earth
Linda Parsons Marion
Linda Parsons Marion’s fourth poetry collection, This Shaky Earth, straddles time, family divisions and legacies, and the regions of her native Tennessee. From her grandmother’s indwelling kitchen and raggedy garden plot to now being a grandmother and gardener herself, she cultivates the lessons and language of the past in her own backyard. Marion’s poems are leavened with a hunger to understand the upheavals of childhood and its growing pains, to be fed full to bursting on life’s vegetable immensity, to face the passing seasons with grace, where all she knows of this black-eyed earth is perishing even as it flowers.
Low Country, High Water
by Sally Stewart Mohney
Inhabiting myriad landscapes, including the marshes, rivers, and sounds of the North Carolina foothills, as well as gulfs, floodplains, and the overflowing banks of the Chattahoochee, Sally Stewart Mohney’s Low Country, High Water consists of delicate, often minimal explorations of family, mortality, nature, and the world behind perception. Often dreamlike and painterly, these poems brim with a lyrical and imagistic power, a contemplative force that ignites the imagination.
Empress of Kisses
by Gwen Heart
The Empress of Kisses explores the landscape of the human heart through free and formal verse. The poems chronicle a wide variety of relationships past and present, real and imagined, with family, friends, lovers, pop culture icons, mythological figures, historical events, and with words themselves. The collection features a special focus on the experiences of Generation X, the "forgotten generation."
"This book offers all the pleasures that poetry affords—sonic felicities, skilled wordplay, resonant insights, and unexpected destinations."—Beth Ann Fennelly, final judge, author of Unmentionables.
The Gordian Review
The Gordian Review is an annual online publication operated by graduate students for graduate students in an effort to present the world a sneak peek of the next generation of writers.
As a branch of Texas Review Press, The Gordian Review combines almost forty years of experience with the fresh ideas of the new generation.
It is our mission to collect and present the best samples of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction from our peers at universities around the country.
