2013

The eighteen poems in this collection recall a boy’s childhood and coming-of-age in a small town in the rural Southeast of the 1960s. Much of the physical evidence of the world in which the boy lived has disappeared over the intervening years as a result of the death of parents and friends as well as profound changes in the natural and social environment of the region. These poems attempt not only to revisit what has been “lost,” but to “find” anew the emotional meaning and significance of the people, objects and things of nature that populated the world being remembered.

“The seemingly simple and direct diction of these exquisitely crafted poems belies the wisdom, insight, and epiphanies looming beneath their crystalline surfaces.”—Larry D. Thomas, Final Judge

David Lanier, who currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico, lived for many years in Washington, D.C., where he was on the faculty of the Georgetown University School of Medicine. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, Marlboro Review, Louisville Review, and several other small magazines.

Billy Carlyle is a professional fighter starting to lose. His eyes cut too easily and his friends—Gabriel, an aspiring actor, and Sam, an artist preparing for her first gallery show—try to persuade Billy to leave the ring.

From the streets of Manhattan to the gyms of Paris, from struggling with hard pasts to harnessing the primal pull, Both Members of the Club is a story of friendship and ambition and violence set against the world of boxing, a place where bodies get tested and truths are exposed.

“This astonishingly personal and touching account of a trio of friends who have emerged from a parentless, family-less childhood to form a lifetime bond is reminiscent of the best of short fiction from the previous century. The narrator and narrative voice of the story is compelling and fascinating, and the two principal characters who round out this small circle are driven by such a power of love and mutual responsibility that it’s moving in almost every way. It’s a stunning story that resonates long after the last page is turned.”—Clay Reynolds

Adam Berlin is the author of the novels Belmondo Style, which won the Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley award, and Headlock. His novel The Number of Missing is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil press. He teaches writing at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

Weaving multiple storylines with vivid description of characters ape, Haske’s debut novel brings new life and a unique voice to the fiction of rural America. North Dixie Highway is a story of family bonds, devolution, and elusive revenge.

When Buck Metzger’s childhood is interrupted by the disappearance of his grandfather, several family members and close friends plot revenge on the suspected killer. From remote towns in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to the Texas/Mexico border, to war-torn Bosnia, Metzger struggles for self-identity and resolution in a world of blue-collar ethics and liquor-fueled violence.

Joseph D. Haske, Chair of English at South Texas College in McAllen, was awarded the 2011 Boulevard Emerging Writers award for short fiction. His work is featured in journals such as Boulevard, The Texas Review, AleCart, and Fiction International. He lives in Mission, Texas, with his wife, Bertha, and their children, Ferny and Joey.

Res ipsa loquitor—the thing speaks for itself—as the lawyers say. But does it? Not in Michael Lieberman’s new book of poems, Bonfire of the Verities. What speaks here is doubt and the commitment to cast aside the apparent truths we all accumulate.

Michael Lieberman is a research physician and poet who has published six collections of poetry and a novel, Never Surrender, Never Retreat. Texas Review Press will also publish his novella, The Lobsterman’s Daughter, in 2014. Lieberman lives in Houston with his wife, the writer Susan Lieberman.

The Jumper is an old-fashioned, modern novel both dark and funny. Its central character, Jimmy Strawhorn, grows up on a ranch in West Texas thinking he’s an orphan but is summoned to Baton Rouge, where he discovers his past is stranger than he can imagine.

Jimmy tries to navigate his urge to jump from high places, his fear of falling in love, and a complex family history full of deceit and racial ambiguity. At the same time, two other eccentric main characters, named Sandra and J. T., deal with dangerous pasts and presents of their own as Jimmy’s arrival alters their lives.

Winner of the 2012 George Garrett Prize for Fiction

Tim Parrish is the author of Fear and What Follows: The Violent Education of a Christian Racist and of the story collection Red Stick Men. A native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he lives in New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches fiction writing in the MFA and undergraduate programs at Southern Connecticut State University.

The Waiting Girl explores the exterior and interior landscapes as they apply to identity, specifically celebrating the Appalachian South and Cape Cod. The poems in this collection carry readers from the cracked red earth of Georgia to the cobblestone streets of Nantucket. Through these bold environments, Ganaway delves into the nuances of mania and melancholia, illuminating the bittersweet nature of bipolar disorder, and raising awareness of this still largely misunderstood state of being.

Erin Ganaway’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Quarterly, Third Coast, The Texas Review, and elsewhere. She was a featured poet inTown Creek Poetry, and her poems were selected for inclusion in Best New Poets, as well as the Georgia volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology. Ganaway holds a Master of Fine Arts from Hollins University. She divides her time between Atlanta and Cape Cod.

The state of Tennessee is widely recognized as a home of great music, and its geographic regions are as distinct as Memphis blues, Nashville country, and Bristol old-time sounds. Tennessee’s literary heritage offers equal variety and quality, as home to the Fugitive Agrarian Poets, as well as a signature voice from the Black Arts Movement. Few states present such a multicultural panorama as does the Volunteer State.

The poems in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee engage the storied histories, diverse cultures, and vibrant rural and urban landscapes of the region. Among the more than 120 poets represented are Pulitzer and Bollingen Prize-winner Charles Wright, Brittingham Award-winner Lynn Powell, and Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize-winners Rick Hilles and Arthur Smith.

Conceived by Series Editor William Wright in 2003, The Southern Poetry Anthology is a multivolume project, published exclusively by Texas Review Press, celebrating established and emerging poets of the American South.

Jesse Graves’ Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine won a Weatherford Award in Poetry and a Book of the Year award from the Appalachian Writers’ Association. Graves lives in Johnson City, Tennessee.

Paul Ruffin, of Willis, Texas, is Texas State University System Regents’ Professor at Sam Houston State University, where he directs Texas Review Press.

William Wright, of Marietta, Georgia, is author of five collections of poems, including Night Field Anecdote and Bledsoe.

Between Cloud and Horizon: A Relationship Casebook in Stories is an examination of what defines the relationships that define each of us, and the myriad forms they take, in a story collection that doubles as a casebook of how we interact with each other.

It is an exposé—in narrative—of what binds—or breaks—the bonds between fathers and sons, partners in crime, brothers, roommates, bandmates, co-workers, the past and the present, man and machine, the living and the dead, book and reader.

Colin Fleming writes for The Atlantic,, Slate, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Tin House, ESPN The Magazine, and The New Criterion. This is his first book.

A nameless and sometimes hapless narrator moves through a series of casual encounters, mostly in the Southwest, with total strangers, average people going about day-to-day, often mundane activities, but taking time to reveal to him, unprompted, their life experiences.

Although he does not invite their attention, they sometimes seem desperate to share their stories with him, mostly because he’s right there, sometimes trapped by circumstance. Often funny, sometimes sad, always poignant in a way, their voices, their words open up their deeper selves, reveal both the comedy and tragedy of individual life, and expose the unique humanity behind the anonymous faces of the ordinary person. Through their candid and unselfconscious revelations, they tell a composite story of the everyday individual muddling through the vicissitudes of everyday life.

Clay Reynolds is an award-winning novelist and short-fiction writer and a widely published scholar and critic. The author of thirteen books and more than a thousand other publications, he is a professor of arts and humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he teaches creative writing and literature. He and his wife, Judy, live in Lowry Crossing, Texas.

Set on the Texas/Mexico border during the early years of Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” Mariguano tells the story of contrabandisto Don Julio Cortina’s ill-fated attempt to secure the Plaza at a national level by fixing the 1988 Mexican Presidential elections.

The story is told through the eyes of Cortina’s son, El Johnny, who bears witness to his father’s cocaine-fueled transformation from devoted head of family to self-destructive head of a criminal organization that is rife with betrayal and deceit.

Anyone who wants to understand the tragedy of modern-day Mexico and America’s complicity in the Mexican drug wars will want to read Mariguano, a novel that recalls classic crime narratives such as Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguys or William S. Burroughs’s Junky but also reads like the work of the best Mexican and Latin American novelists such as Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez.

Juan Ochoa is licensed to practice law in his beloved Mexico. Ochoa has been everything from pistolero to professor and is currently teaching English at South Texas College. He lives happily with his wife and daughter in Mission, Texas, on Inspiration Road. Ochoa is an avid boxing fan.

“In A Little Luck, Jeff Worley presents that rarest of commodities—a voice encyclopedic in its attentions, clever, self-aware, and deeply likeable. Worley’s humor throughout is dark and smart, his phrasings elegant. I would give A Little Luck to the reader who loves the work of Ted Kooser or Rodney Jones. I’d give this book to the reader who does not yet realize he loves poetry.”—Sandra Beasley, Final Judge

Jeff Worley’s first book, The Only Time There Is, won the Mid-List Press First-Book Poetry Prize, and his second book from Mid-List, Happy Hour at the Two Keys Tavern, was named 2006 Kentucky Book of the Year in Poetry. Now retired from the University of Kentucky, he lives in Lexington with his wife, Linda.

Genesis in Japan: The Bible Beyond Christianity rises from a journal of reflections that were collected by the author while teaching the Bible to Japanese university students in Tokyo. It relates the diverse responses to the Bible that rebound, subtly but forcefully, back to the teacher from these students—extraordinary responses, in that they are simple, pure, ordinary, and entirely disorienting.

Teaching and learning the Bible in Japan has led the author to another view of the Bible, one that stands in stark contrast with the Bible in the Bible-heavy culture that was the author’s beginning at a small crossroads in central South Carolina.

Thomas Dabbs is a professor in the Department of English and American Literature at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan, where he teaches Shakespeare and the Bible.

These short, accessible poems describe the experiences of the author as a practicing internist and (later) psychiatrist. Some allude to the responses of patients to a physician with an obvious physical disability. Others describe the reactions of patients to illness, injury, and death.

Some of the poems are funny, some angry, some sad. Reading them has been likened to eating potato chips: “You can’t eat just one.”

Beryl Lawn, born in Cleveland, Ohio, spent her early childhood in College Station, Texas. When she was nine, her father joined the Foreign Service, and until she began college (at the University of Pennsylvania) she lived outside the United States. Prior to starting Temple Medical School she was involved in a crime-related incident, sustained a spinal-cord injury, and became a paraplegic. Her subsequent life (medical school, postgraduate training, medical practice, marriage) has been spent in a wheelchair. Author is now living in Temple, Texas.

Sisters Kim and Kathy Hodges are born sixteen months apart in a middle-class existence parented by Linda and David Hodges of Houston, Texas. The happy couple welcomes their “lucky daughter” Kim, who is physically and mentally advanced. Following several miscarriages, Linda delivers “unlucky” Kathy at twenty-nine weeks, ensuring a life of cognitive and physical disabilities. Kathy enters public school as a special education student, while Kim is recognized as gifted.

Both sisters face life and death decisions as Houston is caught in the rip current of Hurricane Harvey. Kim learns the capricious nature of luck, while Kathy continues to make her own luck, surviving Hurricane Harvey, as she has survived all undertows with the ethereal courage of the resolute.

Sisters of the Undertow examines the connotations of lucky and unlucky, the complexities of sibling rivalry, and the hand fate delivers without reason.

In Map Home, as in Havird’s award-winning chapbook, Penelope’s Design—but amply here—“the memories of ‘a dream-disheveled child’ in the Deep South unfold,” as Eleanor Wilner observes, “into the meditative travels of the literary man in elegant poems riddled with starlight.”

David Havird grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, and studied at the University of South Carolina under James Dickey. He completed his graduate studies at the University of Virginia with a doctoral dissertation on Thomas Hardy. While not a prolific poet, he has published for many years in major journals, having broken into print in 1975 with a poem in The New Yorker. His collection of fourteen poems, Penelope’s Design (2010), won the 2009 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. He lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he teaches at Centenary College.

Considering George Garrett’s life and work in the continuum of American literary history, it is perhaps most profitable to place him in the tradition of the now exceedingly rare Southern “man of letters”—he (or she) who embraces and produces literature in all its complexity and in multiple forms (novels, short stories, poems, plays, criticism, translation, editing, and so on).

This kind of Southern writer, stretching back to Edgar Allan Poe, perhaps finds its best modern examples in the Nashville-based writers of the 1920s and 1930s. Chronologically, Garrett, born in 1929, probably was the most variously gifted Southern writer to arrive on the scene following Robert Penn Warren. Indeed, it is in such company that his life and work belong.

Casey Clabough is the author of the novel Confederado, the travel memoir The Warrior's Path: Reflections Along an Ancient Route, and five scholarly books on Southern writers, including Inhabiting Contemporary Southern & Appalachian Literature: Region & Place in the 21st Century. Clabough serves as editor of the literature section of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities' Encyclopedia Virginia and as general editor of the literary journal James Dickey Review. He lives on a farm in Appomattox County, Virginia, and teaches at Lynchburg College.

Edited by William Wright and Paul Ruffin, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume V: Georgia brings together over one hundred of Georgia’s poets, including David Bottoms, Natasha Trethewey, Leon Stokesbury, Thomas Lux, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Alice Friman, Judson Mitcham, and Stephen Corey, as well as myriad other luminous voices. The volume marks the fifth of the series Art & Literature has called “one of the most ambitious projects in contemporary Southern letters.”

Paul Ruffin, Texas State University System Regents' Professor at Sam Houston State University, is the author of two novels, four collections of stories, four books of essays, and seven collections of poetry.

William Wright is author of Dark Orchard, The Ghost Narratives, and Sleep Paralysis. Wright is the series editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology and founding editor of Town Creek Poetry.