2015

In this Southern memoir, The Help becomes family . . .

Hush Now, Baby is the story of how a little white girl climbed out of an uneasy childhood in the segregated South . . . on the backbone of a black woman who loved her unabashedly. A host of African-American women permeated Southern families. One of those stalwart women was Eva Aiken, a central figure in the author’s life from her birth . . . until Eva staged a sit-in at the girl’s wedding.

The story captures the glorious early years of the Lowcountry South Carolina family then graphically depicts its unraveling. Eva holds them together. The family and the country’s parallel struggles converge. The author lives in bubble-wrap until Civil Rights issues escalate. This story is told without pathos and with graceful restraint—the Southern way.

“Angela’s prose plunges us back in time when a generation of white children were raised by the calloused hands of slaves who, despite being freed by Lincoln, remained chained to a stubborn way of life. Instead of killing us in our sleep, they became our guardian angels, for reasons still mysteriously misunderstood.”—Ken Burger, author of Swallow Savannah, Sister Santee, Salkehatchie Soup, and Baptized in Sweet Tea.

ANGELA WILLIAMS grew up in a family with deep roots in the Lowcountry of South Carolina and currently lives in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. A life-long teacher, she has published academic books and articles as well as short stories. Currently she is a communication consultant and coach.

978-1-68003-034-1 paper with flaps $24.95
978-1-68003-035-8 ebook
51/2x81/2. 360 pp.
Literary Nonfiction.
May

Winner, 2014 George Garrett Fiction Prize

The stories in Get a Grip depict a range of imagined lives. There are Estonian brothers trekking from their blighted neighborhood to a college interview. There’s a TV meteorite hunter in town to search for otherworldly treasure. We meet a widow addicted to physical pain and a successful ad executive who loses all his worldly possessions in one day. All of the characters work out their struggles in the Baltimore region, channeling, in turns, the area’s charm, its despair, its humor, its self-doubt, its compassion. Get a Grip is a book about who we are when the cameras are off and the phone has died.

KATHY FLANN, whose fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, The North American Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, New Stories from the South, and other publications, teaches at Goucher College in Baltimore, where she lives with her husband, Howard. Her previous publications include a short story collection, Smoky Ordinary, and novella entitled Mad Dog.

“In her smart and beautifully observed stories, Kathy Flann drops us straight into the complex lives of a collection of imperfect strivers, who want love, want to be good, or want somehow to transcend their makeshift existences, and who are often their own worst enemies. Each of these tales is simultaneously a portrait of its grim-funny, yet touching protagonist and of a land, very like the United States, where everything is possible, and nothing is quite what it should be.”—Stephen O’Connor

978-1-68003-051-8 paper $14.95
978-1-68003-052-5 ebook
51/2x81/2. 160 pp.
Collection of Short Fiction.
October

Recipes and such from the Texas State Poets Laureate . . .
It should come as no surprise that poets are often exceptionally fine cooks, savoring food the way they savor words and at the same time recognizing that just as a gathering of words does not necessarily mean a good poem, neither does a mixture of ingredients necessarily mean a good recipe.

In Cooking with the Texas Poets Laureate, the editors, all members of Dr. Paul Ruffin’s 2014 graduate Editing/Publishing class, solicited recipes and food-related poetry and prose from Texas Poet Laureates of this millennia. The result is a most unusual gathering of personalities equally comfortable with the spatula or the pen.

EATING TEXAS
It’s taken a long apprenticeship
to make waffles in the shape of Texas.
First there were mountains over Waco.
Then the Panhandle sank.
A few more false starts when
the Red River swamped Oklahoma
and the Rio Grande dripped into Mexico.
Now I can make perfect ones.
All I have to do is take care
to stop pouring the batter a little shy
of El Paso, Dalhart, and Texarkana.
For some reason, Brownsville needs more.
Otherwise, my grandchildren complain they
don’t have the tail of Texas to bite off.
—Jan Seale, 2012 TPL

ELIZABETH ETHREDGE, Joanna Baker, Matthew Bennett, Reina Shay Broussard, Gary Horton, and Julian Kindred were all in the Spring 2014 English graduate program at SHSU, and members of Dr. Paul Ruffin’s Editing/Publishing Practicum which produced this book.
978-1-68003-020-4 paper $22.95
978-1-68003-021-1 ebook
7x9. 160 pp.
Cooking.
January

A Place for Writers Unknown . . .

After thirty-six years as book-editor in New York, Robin retires and moves back to her girlhood home in Oberlin, Ohio. She takes with her copies of items she had kept in a special file.

The items had come not from literary agents but directly from writers, reflecting their quirky, original, creative, passionate, ironic, even bizarre voices. All the items enlighten and entertain.

A Hall of Fame for Unknown Writers is Robin’s story as she reproduces the comic items and nominates them for induction into America’s first (and only) hall of fame for unknown writers, where the motto reads: “We’re in Kansas forevermore.”

S. P. AREHAM is a retired self-employed writer-editor who lived in Kansas, the state that houses the fictional Unknown Writers Hall of Fame in the first novel authored by Areham. Areham now lives in Honolulu, HI, swims in the Pacific on a regular basis, and climbs Diamond Head every now and then as energy, health, and time permit.

“For thirty-six years, I was an editor at a family-owned (now part of a bulky conglomerate) book-publishing house in New York. In retirement, I thought it might be enjoyable to write not the Great American Novel (my authors are trying to do that) but the Fun American Novel. Over the years, I had accumulated all sorts of material that I could weave into the novel: material that came to me directly from the country’s most unforgettable unknown writers and professors.”—Robin

978-1-68003-041-9 paper $22.95
978-1-68003-042-6 ebook
51/2x81/2. 280 pp.
Literary Novel.
November

Winner, 2014 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize
California Book Awards silver medal for fiction, 2016

It’s 1981, and thirteen-year-old Roscoe McAdams and his brother and sister have always lived with their parents, Sebastian and Moonstar, in an isolated cabin high on a ridge in California’s northern Sierra, though often in spring when Moonstar can’t stand the snow anymore she takes them for a stay down below. They’ve mostly been home-schooled.

Then, through a fluke that April, Moonstar becomes a substitute teacher in a small town and enrolls the kids in school there. Roscoe assumes that when summer comes, they’ll go back to the ridge and Sebastian: that’s how it’s always been. But they don’t, and then everything Roscoe thinks he knows for sure begins to fall apart.

ERNEST J. FINNEY, who lives in Sierra County, California, writes stories and novels, mostly set in the San Francisco Bay area or in the Central Valley or the Sierras. His books include Winterchill, Lady With the Alligator Purse, Words of My Roaring, California Time, Birds Landing, Flights in the Heavenlies, and Sequoia Gardens: California Stories.

“This is a novella of beauty, imagination, and the unique bonding of a unique family in a unique situation that captivates from the first few lines and never releases its grip. It is unrelentingly honest, often difficult to absorb because of the discomfort it creates. Peopled by fascinating and original characters, it comes alive on the page and enters the heart, often leaving one breathless.”—Clay Reynolds, Final Judge

978-1-68003-049-5 paper $12.95
978-1-68003-050-1 ebook
51/2x81/2. 128 pp.
Novellas.
November

The history of one of the first WWII POW camps in America . . .

The Enemy Within Never Did Without
German and Japanese Prisoners of War at Camp Huntsville, Texas, 1942–1945

Camp Huntsville was one of the first and largest POW camps constructed in America during World War II. Located roughly eight miles east of Huntsville, Texas, in Walker County, the camp was built in 1942 and opened for prisoners the following year. The camp served as a model site for POW installations across the country and set a high standard for the treatment of prisoners.

Between 1943 and 1945, the camp housed roughly 4,700 German POWs and experienced tense relations between incarcerated Nazi and anti-Nazi factions. Then, during the last months of the war, the American military selected Camp Huntsville as the home of its top-secret re-education program for Japanese POWs.

The irony of teaching Japanese prisoners about democracy and voting rights was not lost on African Americans in East Texas who faced disenfranchisement and racial segregation. Nevertheless, the camp did inspire some Japanese prisoners to support democratization of their home country when they returned to Japan after the war. Meanwhile, in this country, the US government sold Camp Huntsville to Sam Houston State Teachers College in 1946, and the site served as the school’s Country Campus through the mid-1950s.

“This long-overdue project is one I started working on decades ago but didn’t finish. It is gratifying to see the book come to fruition through the efforts of these two history professors. And what a job they’ve done!”—Paul Ruffin, Director, TRP

JEFFREY L. LITTLEJOHN is an associate professor of history and director of the graduate program in history at Sam Houston State University and lives in The Woodlands, Texas. CHARLES H. FORD is chair and professor of history at Norfolk State and lives in Norfolk, Virginia.

978-1-68003-028-0 paper $18.96
978-1-68003-029-7 ebook
51/2x81/2. 232 pp.
World War II.
June

New from the author of Splinterville . . .

Ne’er-do-well immigration attorney Harrison Bent can’t imagine why the wealthy and mysterious Maggie Leudecke wants him to solve her eminent domain problem.

If he didn’t have an angry wife to placate, an inscrutable stalker to identify, an obsessed girlfriend to escape, and a murder to solve, a successful outcome to the Leudecke case might revive his career, pay for his autistic son’s special school, and—most important of all—help convince his young paralegal, Chloe, that the afternoon she spent with him in a cheap motel wasn’t an error in judgment, but the beginning of something profound. If only he had some clue as to what he was doing . . . .

From the book:
I know myself. That’s the good news. That’s also the bad news. For example, I knew I was not equipped to deal with the Leudecke case. I also knew I wouldn’t turn it down or hand it off to somebody better suited. But, seriously, what background did I have in eminent domain? Or with Mexican drug dealers? Or dead Mexican drug dealers? None. And I knew it.

CLIFF HUDDER earned an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Houston. His work has received the Barthelme and Michener Awards, the Peden Prize, and the Short Story Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. His novella, Splinterville, won the 2007 Texas Review Fiction Award. He teaches English at Lone Star College–Montgomery and lives in Conroe, Texas.

978-1-68003-038-9 paper $22.95
978-1-68003-039-6 ebook
51/2x81/2. 344 pp.
Literary Novel.
July

Houston's own Iliad . . .

Does Houston need its own Iliad? If it's Mike Lieberman's, it does. In this nervy adaptation of Homer's classic, the story of Achilles' rage is told with a deft touch and a large dollop of humor.

Achilles, an MIT-trained engineer, has dropped out and with Patroclus, his white macaw, cruises around Houston on an old BMW motorcycle looking for trouble. And he finds plenty.

The result is a wry take on Houston and an uncompromising exploration of the rage of men in contemporary society.

Here's how Lieberman's narrator introduces the story:

Achilles' wrath is where our tale begins
then spools out venom and his mortal sins.
It's tempered true but false to Homer's style,
suffused with guile, grit, and mordant wiles.
The enterprise is underpinned by myth—
Achilles' soul and psyche are the plinth
on which our story's force and verve depend,
and which the meddling gods and fate upend.
Men savage men in violent travails
though in the end it's humor that prevails.

MICHAEL LIEBERMAN, retired research physician, is the author of six books of poems and three previous novels: Never Surrender--Never Retreat, The Lobsterman’s Daughter, and The Women of Harvard Square. He lives in Houston with his wife, the writer Susan A. Lieberman.

978-1-68003-055-6 paper $18.95
978-1-68003-056-3 ebook
51/2x81/2. 208 pp.
Literary Novel.
October

“We are the fools of time and terror.”—Lord Byron

Associate Professor Gale Ruthven, a vampire with nearly four hundred years of service at eighty-three colleges and universities, teaches British Romantic poetry at an obscure commuter college somewhere in far West Texas, enjoying an existence of literary research, student papers, and the bare amount of blood-sucking necessary to survive. His chief aggravation is the Regency Romantic poet, Lord Byron, on whom he fed in 1816 and who refuses to play the role of submissive underling.

When a powerful and seductive vampire named Tempest joins the faculty, Ruthven becomes entangled in a dark mystery involving ancient vampire cults in Mexico and the American Southwest, a hippie vampire named Via Medea, grave robbers in Byron’s Gothic ancestral estate in Nottinghamshire, and a shadowy vampire associate from Ruthven’s early nineteenth-century past—all of which lead him on a wild chase across two continents and to a final showdown in the New Mexico badlands.

THOMAS H. SCHMID lives with his wife Joanie in El Paso, where he has taught for 25 years. He is Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso and the author or editor of books on Humor and Transgression in the Shelley circle, Romanticism and Pleasure (coedited with Michelle Faubert), and A Student Guide to Writing about Literature.

“Tom Schmid has written the ultimate vampire novel. The unholy crew has invaded academia, where the wellsprings of blood are fresh and abundant. Fools of Time is easily the most entertaining novel I’ve read in years.”—Rick DeMarinis

978-1-68003-057-0 paper $18.95
978-1-68003-058-7 ebook
51/2x81/2. 224 pp.
Literary Novel.
November

Gripping prison mystery . . .

Sign of Redemption tells the story of Richie Harrison, an innocent CPA who lands behind bars in a Texas prison—the unwitting “wheelman” in an unexpected armed robbery.

Harrison falls in love with Elizabeth McKenna, a lawyer there to help Harrison’s deaf friend, and thoughts of her—and the life he’s lost—begin to obsess him. He escapes, on horseback and across a raging river, and finds safety with a drug-dealing family while scheming to win his love.

To woo her, Harrison drags McKenna on a destructive journey that transforms him into the criminal he never imagined he’d become.

From the book:
When I first got sent down, I thought about escaping every day, and every day I thought of the bullet that would pierce my back and exit through my breastbone in a bloody spray. I thought of myself tumbling out of a dead run, my legs buckling, my face hitting the pavement. Maybe I’m just a coward if all it takes to make a coward is a vivid imagination. But I wasn’t here long before I found out what it sounded like when the blood left the body in gurgling rushes.

LISA TROW is a poet and fiction writer and a former journalist. She has a master’s degree in creative writing from Oklahoma State University and has served as adjunct faculty teaching creative writing in Texas prisons. Trow was an editor at the Austin American-Statesman and managing editor for the Huntsville Item. She lives in Austin, Texas, and has a daughter, Katie Renaud.

978-1-68003-030-3 paper $18.95
978-1-68003-031-0 ebook
51/2x81/2. 240 pp.
Literary Novel.
July

Memoir of a Central Texas Baby Boomer
“All the more desirable coastal land of the New World had been acquired by the 1840s and ’50s. The Scots-Irish entered this country through the Mid-Atlantic States rather than New England. They settled first in Virginia and Maryland and then moved on to Kentucky and Virginia. Some went further south from there, while others moved west.

Raiders and Horse Thieves is the story of my early childhood in Cedar Creek, Texas (Bastrop County), during the final days of World War II. Due to Reconstruction and the Great Depression, economic growth in this central Texas County had been severely restricted. The residents maintained the pioneer values and lived the lifestyle of a much earlier period. This is a true story of the human will to persevere, against Nature and against one another. I describe growing up in a ramshackle old house called The Holcomb Place, in Cedar Creek, Bastrop County. All the elements of life in rural Texas are there: drought; storms; rattlesnakes; religion; guns. . . .”—Jackie Ellis Stewart

From the book:
It was Judy who found the family plot hidden among a clump of young mesquites. The larger headstone was broken; lying face down and embedded in the earth. A number of smaller markers had once surrounded it, but time and the weather, as well as grazing animals and invasive vegetation, had worn them down to indecipherable sandstone lumps. The men were able to pull the larger marker free; they used Joe’s handkerchief to clean off the inscription. Sure enough: Absalom Ellis.

JACKIE ELLIS STEWART, born in Bastrop, Texas, was educated in the central Texas public school system, the University of Texas at Austin, and George Peabody College in Nashville. She married Jack Stewart in 1968. The couple has four children and four grandchildren and currently are living in a suburb of Memphis, with their better-than-standard poodle, George.

978-1-68003-061-7 paper $18.95
978-1-68003-062-4 ebook
51/2x81/2. 200 pp.
Literary Nonfiction.
November

Set in the suburbs and cities of the Midwest, Mid-South, and Texas, these stories explore the lives of characters biracial, black, white, and all sorts of in-between.

The intersections and collisions of contemporary life are in full effect here, where the distinctions between fast food and fine art, noble and naked ambitions, reality and reality shows have become impossible to distinguish.

Read these stories and understand why Steve Yarbrough said Williams “writes like Paul Auster if he were funnier or like Stanley Elkin might have if he’d ever been able to stop laughing.”

“Tom Williams has done the near impossible in penning a book that is both undeniably entertaining and deeply thoughtful, Millhauser meets Bukowski meets Ellison.”—Alan Heathcock, author of Volt

“Sure, we need the nudge of category to help us all think straight, but we also need the rangy trickster, Tom Williams, to do the bang-up boundary work of imaginary anthropology in these deadpan, dead-on gems. These infiltrating texts take us sideways, through and through, turn us inside-out.”—Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Four for a Quarter

TOM WILLIAMS, who earned his PhD from the University of Houston, is the author of two books of fiction: The Mimic’s Own Voice and Don’t Start Me Talkin. The Chair of English at Morehead State University, he resides in Morehead, Kentucky, with his wife and son.

978-1-68003-018-1 paper $14.95
978-1-68003-019-8 ebook
51/2x61/2. 192 pp.
Collection of Short Fiction.
July

The poems in Alluvial Cities are drawn from this layered landscape's geology and history, its people and language, and the kindred ties between earth and water, flesh and blood.

DEUCALIONIDS

The waters broke from the void before first light,
a divinity ripping through the trembling flesh
of marshes and the levees’ old clay thighs,
covering every mile of St. Bernard Parish.

Houses with their cement slabs have floated
light as the rinds of watermelons you ate as a boy
and chucked into Lake Catherine, swelled to overflowing
by the god that surged into the Rigolets estuary

and left an afterbirth of sweet crude leaked
from foundered tanks. Cars hang like carrion
birds on the highest branches and torn roofs. Leached
of mud and flood waters, the houses we pass cry out

broken window panes, duct-taped fridges, and a stillness
that leaves us on the dead grass of this
woman’s home, like so many thrown bones.

CHRISTOPHER M. HANNAN is an attorney in New Orleans.

978-1-68003-022-8 paper $8.95
978-1-68003-023-5 ebook
51/2x81/2. 64 pp.
Poetry.
May

New from 2005 Texas State Poet Laureate . . .

New and Selected Works

This is the most complete selection of work by 2005 Texas State Poet Laureate Alan Birkelbach ever put in one volume. It brings together selections that represent his more recognizable pieces, work that has only been available in journals, work that has only been available in books that are out of print or unavailable, plus a generous selection of new work.

In Case of Poetry Reading Break Glass

It is almost certain this is a scenario that will never happen:
if someone spontaneously combusts while reading something
by Bukowski then perhaps they should be allowed to burn.
Then let’s all go for the axe.

Of course, the sign there would read, “In case of fire break glass,”
and inside the tiny little alcove,
the shelf barely big enough to hold an ancient dwarf mummy,
would be a poetry book

which most of us, I fear, would not know how to use.
We would stare blankly at it for several seconds,
wondering what possible good it could do us,
how it might yet save our lives.

ALAN BIRKELBACH, a native Texan currently living in The Colony, Texas, was the 2005 Poet Laureate of Texas. He has been named as one of the Distinguished Poets of Dallas, was nominated for Wrangler, Spur, and Pushcart Prizes, and is a member of both the Texas Institute of Letters and The Academy of American Poets.

978-1-68003-043-3 paper $10.95
978-1-68003-044-0 ebook
51/2x81/2. 200 pp. Poetry.
October

Winner, 2014 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize

Set in the drought-plagued landscape of Central Texas, Ascension is a collection of lyric poems that chronicles life in and around Llano, Texas (population 3,033). Brownlee’s poems meditate on the inescapability of place.

Organ Solo with Oblivion and Gar

Skittish fish lay eggs
 in this shallow stone
 cleft of an algae chorus.
  Turn my soul into song,
   if you can, River Lord.
    Treat believing the same
     as each minnow slipping
      coin-like into deep murk.
       Your spirit mimics me
       unblinking, fishbone
       face framing brackish
      absence, saying, Kneel
     into this. Lean low,
     sinner, & drink. Bitter
   infidel, swallow the black
  granite whole if you are not
 afraid of what comes after it:
___________. Live forever.

J. SCOTT BROWNLEE is a founding member of the Localists, a literary collective that emphasizes placebased writing of personal witness, cultural memory, and the aesthetically marginalized working class. His poems appear in The Kenyon Review, Narrative, Beloit Poetry Journal, RATTLE, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

978-1-68003-045-7 paper $8.95
978-1-68003-046-4 ebook
51/2x81/2. 48 pp. Poetry.
September

New from 2011 Texas State Poet Laureate . . .

Award winning poetry critic Ange Mlinko wrote of Parsons and his work, “The Renaissance man was once a courtly ideal; Parsons shows that it is a democratic ideal too—warm-blooded, muscular, as companionable on the page as in the flesh.” Both tangible and cerebral, Parsons’s poetry lifts its readers into a new, transformational reality with a depth of insight that is truly exceptional.

Reaching For Longer Water brings the reader, the most compelling of his poems from his previous four collections, poems hailed by poetry luminaries, Edward Hirsch, Stanley Plumly, Robert Phillips, and Paul Mariani.

THE FRANK GAZE OF WOMEN

After Baudelaire’s “Exotic Scent”
Yes, yes, they bestow delights—
    not only in the seedy way
we all know: they plant something
    in the littoral vacancy
and in an instant there is an ineffable
    fire—that forging force
on which so much more depends
    than wheelbarrows & chickens.

DAVID M. PARSONS, 2011 Texas Poet Laureate, teaches at Lone Star College. He lives in Conroe, Texas.

978-1-68003-032-7 paper $12.95
978-1-68003-033-4 ebook
51/2x81/2. 200 pp.
Poetry.
April

Poems Selected and New

William Virgil Davis is a widely published, awardwinning poet. Among his many honors, fellowships, and awards are the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, the New Criterion Poetry Prize, and the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Poetry. His poems regularly appear in leading journals, both in this country and abroad. His Dismantlements of Silence: Poems Selected and New brings together a generous selection of Davis’s poetry to date. It includes samples of his early uncollected work, poems from his previously published books, and selections from his most recently published work.

Driving Alone in Winter

Driving alone in winter through acres of land
deserted by everything save the snow
trapped in the ruts of the road,
the moon broken by the bare trees,
I remember the days when my brothers and I would fall asleep
in the backseat on the way home.

Tonight, coming home, I remember
the faint light on the dashboard holding my father’s face,
my mother’s soft voice, my brothers asleep,
the moon running among the trees beside the car.

WILLIAM VIRGIL DAVIS, of Austin, Texas, has published five other books of poetry: The Bones Poems; Landscape and Journey; Winter Light; The Dark Hours; and One Way to Reconstruct the Scene, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. A widely published scholar, he is Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Baylor University.

978-1-68003-047-1 paper $12.95
978-1-68003-048-8 ebook
51/2x81/2. 200 pp. Poetry.
October

New poems from 2004 Texas State Poet Laureate . . .

Poems from sonnets to free verse focus on pleasures and problems in ranch life and in west Texas, which include variations differing for generations returning to the ranch, and those family members who leave the ranch for city life.

CORMORANTS’ JOURNEY
Snowbirds come diving down, sliding in
carelessly splatting,
pecking on windows, doors,
building nests, dropping threads,
shards of old nests hanging on their beaks,
claws. Their fluttering white feathers
blocking the sun’s puny attempts to break through,
making the streets slick with their droppings
as their baggage slides by,
bumping into place side by side by side.
Odysseus would tramp off to far west Texas,
hankering for firm enchiladas, crusty tacos,
brown eyes, and thin clear skies.

CLEATUS RATTAN, 2004 Texas State Poet Laureate, recently retired as Mayborn professor of English at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. He lives in Cisco, Texas.

978-1-68003-026-6 paper $12.95
978-1-68003-027-3 ebook
51/2x81/2. 200 pp.
Poetry.
May

Set primarily in a garden alongside a tidal river in Maine, River Road maps the troubled path of a middle-aged man torn between longing for an idealized past that never existed and realizing he must remain vulnerable to a future of love despite “the sure blights and wilt to come.”

Over Breakfast

. . . he said, We need to reinvent
ourselves, meaning not so much the
pair as the each of us, as if we
could unroll the raw blue-print of
being, right there
on the table between us
by setting our bowls and cups at
the corners to fix it
in place and staring down
abstract anew the physics of stress and
tolerance into other schemata, as if time
were a constant
and love, an infinite variable
that always yields a positive future, but
one yet together, as if mindfulness were
will and will by necessity commands
action. So we sat, long, looking each into
the other’s eyes.

RICHARD FOERSTER is the author of Sudden Harbor, Patterns of Descent, Trillium, Double Going, The Burning of Troy, and Penetralia (Texas Review Press, 2011). Recipient of numerous honors, including the “Discovery”/ The Nation Award, Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize, a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and two NEA poetry fellowships, he lives on the coast of Southern Maine.

978-1-68003-053-2 paper $8.95
978-1-68003-054-9 ebook
6x9. 80 pp. Poetry.
September

New from 2008 Texas State Poet Laureate . . .

The present volume draws on nine book-length collections of Thomas’s poetry, and includes a generous selection of new poems.

Five of the collections are comprised of poems of geographic place, four of which are set primarily in
Texas. His fifth “place” collection is set on the coast of Maine. The poems selected from his remaining collections range in subject matter from outlaw bikers to ekphrasis; from the avian world to an asylum for the criminally insane.

PIANO TUNER
The tools of his trade
are unassuming and relatively
primitive. The stagehand
is his counterpart in drama.

In the shadows of architects,
for grand cathedrals of sonatas,
he lays the bricks. Of pitch
and tone, he is master.
Even a concert pianist
steers clear of his ear.

LARRY D. THOMAS, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate and resident of Alpine, Texas, retired from a career in social service and adult criminal justice. He is the author of several collections of poetry.

978-1-68003-024-2 paper $12.95
978-1-68003-025-9 ebook
51/2x81/2. 200 pp.
Poetry.
April

Winner, 2014 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize
The poems in Inked—full of twisting roads and highways, of inhabited rooms and abandoned houses—chart a course of departure and return. These are finelycrafted, musical poems, attentive to the world’s rhythms in an Ohio apple orchard, at a Midlands train station, in the throbbing life of the South.

Instructions for Return
  Follow the serpentine river roads
toward the Little Miami’s lip. Pass
  through the sycamores, their molting
whitewashed limbs. These are curves
  I can still ride hard, roads
I can trace along a back’s bare skin.
  Feel that wind, saturated, undercut
with vespertine chill. Let it frizz
  your hair. Turn up the Smashing
Pumpkins or the Cowboy Junkies.
  That’s river musk on your teeth. See
how the lightning bugs burn their bulbs
  just ahead? In the rearview, bats unstitch
your wake. Now the humming bridge
  in your fingertips and thighs.
Remember that darkening vein underneath,
  how it pushes and pushes toward
main stem waters. The truss will bear
  your weight ten thousand times.

CORINNA MCCLANAHAN SCHROEDER received her MFA from the University of Mississippi and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award in poetry, and her poems have been published in numerous journals. She lives with her husband, Matthew, in Los Angeles, California.

978-1-68003-059-4 paper $8.95
978-1-68003-060-0 ebook
51/2x81/2. 64 pp. Poetry.
September

New from the winner of the 2010 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize . . .

“Drew may have lived many years among the Yanks, but his Mississippi roots are having their say, shining through in every irreverent/reverent syllable. Once you pick this book up, you won’t be putting it down any time soon!”—Nancy White

THE DOWN AND DIRTY REDNECK
HUNGERS FOR THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY
I’ve always been afraid of burning to death,
but with you I was like a tree in October,
on fire with a shitload of leaves just
before the north wind ripped them loose
and sent them ass over teacup earthward. Girl,
if only you would come again driving
down Main Street, your long golden hair
streaming out the window like yellow flames,
your white Mustang unstained as you was,
I wouldn’t give a damn about how I go,
only that the crash when it comes rivals
them leaves up to their stems in duff,
and that one day we can look back and say
okay, we crashed, but we crashed still burning.

GEORGE DREW lives in Poestenkill in New York State. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including The View from Jackass Hill.

978-1-68003-036-5 paper $8.95
978-1-68003-037-2 ebook
51/2x81/2. 64 pp.
Poetry.
June

Part Bible-belt, cotton-belt, corn-belt, and firmly set within tornado alley, with the sparse and austere beauty of the Panhandle and remote Dell City, the green lushness of the Hill Country, and the urbanity of cities such as Austin and Houston, Texas is a complex world unto itself.

The eighth volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology reflects this variegation with poems both traditional and experimental, Texas-centered and universal.

SOW

Chomping her chocolates
of fresh road kills, she swaggers
through her slop, oblivious
of the piglets she crushed
during last night’s slumber,
squishing through the splits
of her thick, cloven hooves.
The last boar which tried
to straddle her fabulous girth
fractured both forelegs.
She dined on his carcass
for days, grunting in the shade.

—Larry Thomas

WILLIAM WRIGHT, author of four books of poetry and series editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, lives in Marietta, Georgia. PAUL RUFFIN is the author or editor of over thirty books. He lives in Willis, Texas. NICK LANTZ, author of three poetry collections, teaches poetry at Sam Houston State University and lives in Huntsville, Texas.

978-1-68003-063-1 paper $22.95
978-1-68003-064-8 ebook
6x9. 296 pp. Poetry.
November