2008

Winner of the 2007 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Page

"Bocage" and Other Sonnets is a collection of meticulously crafted sonnets that take a hard-edged, uncompromising look at human behavior-like the man trapped in an elevator with his former lover's husband, the criminal staring at his own wanted poster, the colorblind visitor in an art gallery, or the cartographer who creates a fictitious town. This diverse collection of poems also includes some light verse, love sonnets, translations, and several Biblically based sonnets.

In Painting the Christmas Trees, Joe Weil explores the meaning of neighborhood, both its rootedness and its transience in terms of the port city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, in which he was formed as a poet. His work mixes different registers of language, from the Rust Belt working class speech of his family and friends to the poetic influences of his first reading: Roethke, Williams, Stevens, and Yeats. His Irish Catholic working class upbringing instills his poetry with a sense of communion. The poems in this book are anchored to the loss and the brio of people he has known and worked among both as a toolmaker and as a poet. He is essentially a spiritual comic in so far as his interest lies as much with the vitally ugly and broken as it does with the smoothly eloquent. Unlike many volumes of poetry, Painting the Christmas Trees is full of characters, not unlike a novel. Weil believes a poet should reclaim the name of storyteller. He is not ashamed to be one.

This collection is compiled from the unpublished poems of Karl Shapiro at the University of Texas in Austin and elsewhere. They are largely as Shapiro left them, in a desk drawer in his apartment in uptown Manhattan.

Winner of the 2008 Texas Review Poetry Prize

Physically grounded in the American South and Southwest, the poems in Are We There Yet? chart the poet's psychic and spiritual journey through the regions of youth and maturity, faith and uncertainty, innocence and experience, and past and present, reflecting the contrarieties of time and its incompleteness. These lyrics depict an unfolding emotional dialectica-a struggle, where moments and events are held up and analyzed for clues about how we stand firm amid the velocity of circumstance and experience.

Winner of the 2007 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize

"There's an allusion in these pages to Emily Dickinson's line about hope being the thing with feathers, and there is a lot of hope and determination in these fine poems about a mother's love for her autistic son. The poems travel from his birth through his pre-teen years, and the language is always precise, sometimes fierce . . . Dark Card illuminates with its darkness." --Robert Phillips, Series Judge

When Monique LeBlanc disappears from Nova Scotia, her cousin Michelle is panic-stricken. Their summer vacation has taken an ominous turn, and a search begins. At the site of Monique's disappearance in Grand-Pre Historic Park, police find a picture of her mother, Catherine, who passed away years ago, near Evangeline's statue.

Michelle knows that Monique is visiting the park to honor the dream she shared with her mother of visiting their Canadian homeland. What she doesn't know is that Monique has gone back in time to her ancestors' exile, actually living through the horrific deportation of thousands of Acadians to Louisiana in 1755.

Winner of the 2007 Texas Review Fiction Award

Near starvation in Northern Georgia, Confederate private Henry Wallace of Hood's Texas Brigade accidentally ingests psychotropic mushrooms before marching into the second day of the Battle of Chickamauga, but lives to tell about it in a long (forty-one-foot) letter to his dead comrade's father. Or does he? As Private Wallace's meandering tale, scrawled on a roll of wrapping paper, unravels, historians and scholars battle in footnotes over whether this document full of peculiar claims, internal inconsistencies, and anachronistic content is a first-hand report or an elaborate forgery.

The Southern Poetry Anthology Volume I: South Carolina is the first in a series of poetry anthologies that will focus on contemporary poetry of the American South, region by region. In this inaugural collection, editors William Wright and Stephen Gardner have collected and compiled the work of seventy-six poets who claim-or have claimed sometime in their life-South Carolina as home and as a palpable influence on their work.

Winner of the 2007 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize

Arriving at an island resort, Scott and Kate make the acquaintance of an older couple, the Griffins, already tanning on the beach. When Scott agrees to do the Griffins a favor, he sets in motion a series of encounters and dilemmas-both between the two couples and within them. Scott believes it will be an adventure; Kate doesn't like the sound of it. There's something mysterious about the situation. Everyone's language hides secrets. Relying on the rhythms of poetry, Palms Are Not Trees After All is a story about exploration and accommodation, about deciding which stories travel, which to tell.

Winner of the 2007 George Garrett Fiction Prize

Williamson examines not only the life and work of Jack London, but his own life and attitudes toward the poor, toward London, Oakland, culture and literature. A blend of autobiography, criticism, scholarship, and polemic, Oakland, Jack London, and Me is a book written not just for academics and students. Jack London remains one of the best-selling American authors in the world, and Williamson's Oakland, Jack London, and Me is as accessible as any of the works of London, his direct literary forbear and mentor.

Winner of the 2008 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize

Mom's Canoe is a chapbook of 24 poems rooted in the author's memories of growing up in the Allegheny Mountains in western Pennsylvania, an area of rich farmland and thickly wooded hills and valleys that was also the site of heavy coal mining and railroading activity in the last century. The eventual decline of those industries and the environmental and economic devastation left in their wake are important themes in this book, which also pays tribute to the enduring natural beauty of the region and to the strength, suffering, and joy of the people who have made their lives there.

Winner of the 2006 George Garrett Fiction Prize

Left behind by the hyper-acceleration of a new century are the lives encountered in Sky Full of Burdens. In one way or another facing extinction or obsolescence, the men and women in these stories could be described as vestigial: the proprietor of a failing grocery in a town literally about to be erased from the map; a man isolated by a physical handicap who stakes much of his identity to an engineering quirk on a local highway. Exile from their comfort zones brings them into direct contact with irrevocable mistakes, deferred realizations, and unexpected connections with the humanity and fallibility of others. The interplay of painful losses and discovered compensations is echoed in the alternately bleak and beautiful landscape of northern Michigan.

A dark comedy written in rollicking prose, Hog to Hog deals with excessive development in a relatively pristine Midwestern rural area. The spoils of misadventure go to the top polluters, like Dick Columbus, who makes money for the state's coffers with his Wheeleroo!, an ATV mega event that runs roughshod over the local nature sanctuary. Columbus wins a seat in the state Senate. Bernie Sapp, the novel's protagonist, lacks political savvy and power and ends up in one of Columbus's pet projects, the newly constructed prison. With a culture based on plunder and socio-economic injustice, the ordinary man's American Dream turns into the American Nightmare.