2014

Jefferson Davis to his Wife, 1865–1866

The center of this book is Fortress Monroe, Virginia, inserted in
the dateline of every one of the twenty letters printed here. Only a
little note at the end, folded to make its own envelope, is different.
Its place name is Prison. Both are accurate. Months before the first
letter, the US Army converted one of the fort’s gun emplacements
into a jail cell, complete with iron bars and an ever-pacing squad
of armed soldiers—all to secure one man: Jefferson Davis.
After three months of anxiety about his family, this solitary
confinement finally forces Davis to ask if he may write to his
wife, Varina. He may, but he does not even know where she is.
The Army locates her and delivers his letter—the first one in this
book.

The rest reflect the news that Varina’s letters bring: of the sorrows
of the conquered South, of an unexpected refuge in Canada, and
of friends scattered through Europe, waiting to go home. Through
the Davises’ eyes we see their own past happiness, their present
misery, and a shadowy future (his life is at stake) brightened
always by the husband’s trust in God.

FELICITY ALLEN, who lives in Lexington, Kentucky, grew up in the
Deep South during the Great Depression. For most of her life she has
been involved in research on Confederate States of America President
Jefferson Davis. She is the author of Jefferson Davis, Unconquerable
Heart, published by the University of Missouri Press.

978-1-937875-74-9 paper $18.95
978-1-937875-75-6 ebook
51/2x81/2. 148 pp.
Southern History.
June

“. . . a fascinating contribution to the understanding of perhaps
our nation’s darkest hour.”—Shelby Foote

Selected Memoirs, Poems, and Fiction by Virginia Women Who Lived Through the Civil War

In their variety, the memoir, poetry, and fiction included in this exciting new anthology show the transitory nature of the literature of southern women who lived through a violent and defining crossroads in their lives. In rare and rediscovered excerpts and verses these women writers evidence the early hopes of a cause destined to be lost, the propagandic rhetoric which accompanied it, and the destruction ultimately visited upon them, their homes, and their families. Paradoxically, even as these women defended and spoke out for a cause concerned in part with extending human bondage, they found themselves forced to experience the harsh wind of freedom and personal agency as their husbands, sons, and fathers abandoned them to their homes and, in many cases, never returned.

The editor, who also serves as editor of the literature section of the Virginia Foundation for Humanities’ Encyclopedia Virginia, has chosen these pieces carefully and arranged them chronologically or thematically depending on the content of each genre. A book that should prove useful to literary scholars, historians, and anyone possessed of an interest in the Civil War, Women of War brings to light a cornucopia of heretofore obscure women’s writings which enrich our understanding of a complex, unsettling time unmatched in our nation’s history.

CASEY CLABOUGH is the author of eight books, including the internationally acclaimed novel Confederado and George Garrett: A Literary Biography (Texas Review Press, 2013). A past recipient of the Bangladesh International Literary Award, he edits both the literary journal James Dickey Review and the literature section of Encyclopedia Virginia. Clabough is a resident of Appomattox, Virginia.

978-1-937875-49-7 paper $18.95
978-1-937875-50-3 ebook
51/2x81/2. 160 pp.
Literary Nonfiction.
July

Book Culture in the Digital Age—Essays, Reflections, Interventions

American Book Review is not just a book review—it is also the heart and soul of writerly writing and small press publishing. In 2006, the publication was relocated to Victoria, Texas, where cultural critic and philosopher Jeffrey R. Di Leo became Editor and Publisher. Turning the Page collects Di Leo’s contributions to American Book Review from his more recent “Page 2” entries on “social reading” and book bannings in Arizona to his early engagements with the work of Raymond Federman and Harold Jaffe. The common themes are book and publishing culture, and how they intersect with current problems in the humanities, including the rise of neoliberalism.

“There is no dimension of contemporary book culture that Jeffrey Di Leo doesn’t examine beautifully in Turning the Page. These essays are essential reading for everyone who cares about the state of literature today.”—Charles Johnson, author, Middle Passage “For the past decade, Jeffrey Di Leo, the editor of American Book Review, has been a witty, genial, super-well-informed, and incisive guide to what’s been happening on the literary scene as well as the public world beyond it.”—Marjorie Perloff, Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita, Stanford University “Literary culture is going through convulsions not seen since the emergence of the printing press, which is exactly why Jeffrey Di Leo’s Turning the Page is such necessary reading.”—Steve Tomasula, author, TOC: A New-Media Novel

JEFFREY R. DI LEO is Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria. He is editor and founder of the critical theory journal symploke, editor and publisher of the American Book Review, and executive director of the Society for Critical Exchange. He resides in Victoria, Texas.

978-1-937875-51-0 paper $19.95
978-1-937875-52-7 ebook
51/2x81/2. 176 pp.
Literary Criticism.
May

Stories From China’s Special Generation

Zhiqing: Stories from China’s Special Generation presents the recollections of fourteen men and women who were “sent down” to the countryside during China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Teenagers or young adults at the time, the authors left school to heed Mao’s call for China’s “educated youth” (zhiqing) to go to the poorest provinces and distant borders, where they worked with the local people in villages or on military farms and construction teams. From the Great Northern Wilderness to Hainan Island, their true-to-life stories illustrate the harsh realities of rural existence and Cultural Revolution politics while focusing on personal joys and miseries. While not meant as a political statement, these stories serve as a powerful testimony to the experience
of an entire Chinese generation.

“It was my distinct pleasure to have served as in-house editor of Kang Xuepei’s In the Countryside, which was initially her masters of arts thesis at SHSU. It was hard to imagine the horrors that these Chinese youth had to go through during that period of Mao’s experiment in social engineering and more amazing to realize that most of them came through it all without intense bitterness toward those who thrust them into such perilous and uncomfortable circumstances. In this book you will find a sampling of the experiences of zhiqing from many perspectives written in strikingly fine prose.”—Paul Ruffin, director, Texas Review Press

KANG XUEPEI, a zhiqing from 1969–1974 in Jia Shan County, Anhui province, had a book, In The Countryside, published by Texas Review Press. Living in Houston, she is self-employed. LI WEI, a resident of Houston, was a zhiqing from 1968–1975 in Shanxi and Hebei provinces. She has been an instructor at Lone Star College since 1992. QIN YANG, a zhiqing from 1974–1978 in Guangyuan County, Sichuan province, currently works in Houston at Air Liquide America Corporation as chief chemist. ZENG JIANJUN, a zhiqing from 1968–1973 in Beidahuang in Northeastern China, has been a research scientist with the University of Houston since 2007.

978-1-937875-69-5 paper $22.95
978-1-937875-70-1 ebook
51/2x81/2. 240 pp.
Literary Nonfiction.
June

The Lobsterman’s Daughter chronicles murder and deceit in five generations of a Maine family, the Markhams. The story’s narrator, Henrietta Markham, is a recent Harvard graduate, who submits an early version as her honors thesis. She tells the tale in her own voice and the conjured voices of her relatives, both living and dead.

After graduation, in Barcelona she faces her own deceit in omitting her sins from the story and adds a journal that documents her bizarre attempts at expiation and atonement. Markham sends the new version back to her advisor and asks that it be published as her final word on her family’s history.

In an epilogue Lieberman’s author struggles unsuccessfully to regain control of a narrator who is at once incorrigible and essential.

MICHAEL LIEBERMAN, a research physician and poet who lives in Houston with his wife Susan, has published five collections of poems and won the 2001 Pen-Texas Award for fiction. His first novel, Never
Surrender—Never Retreat, was published by Texas Review Press in 2012, and his latest collection of poetry, Bonfire of the Verities, was released by TRP in 2013.

978-1-937875-59-6 paper $14.95
978-1-937875-60-2 ebook
51/2x81/2. 160 pp.
Literary Novel.
April

“I was trying to remember the other day exactly what my first memories are of Kimble County, of Junction, of Segovia, Texas. There is some spectacular stuff there, if I can bring it all to the surface—without making anything up. That’s not real hard to do, but it takes time. You have to go slow.”–Bob Winship

“In my almost forty years of editing, from journals to anthologies to books, I have from time to time encountered a spectacular talent who, because of circumstance, has never been recognized for the genius that he is. Such is the case with Bob Winship, whose story collection The Brushlanders is as fine a book of short fiction as has ever come out of the state of Texas and whose two novels, Every Man Also and Flannery’s Crossing, are astonishingly fine reads. Bob keeps to himself, though, and refuses to engage in the self-promotion game that so often propels to prominence lesser lights that in time will extinguish on their own, dying from simple lack of talent.

“In this, Bob’s first book of essays, the reader will get an in-depth look at one of our finest writers and relish the rich literary world that he brings to life.”—Paul Ruffin, director, Texas Review Press

BOB WINSHIP, a native Texan who spent much of his earlier life in Houston, later worked in the oil-tool industry, making numerous trips to Russia. After earning his master’s of arts in creative writing, he taught for Texas A&M and other colleges before retiring to the family’s Rockpile Ranch in Segovia. He is the author of several books of fiction.

978-1-937875-55-8 paper $19.95
978-1-937875-56-5 ebook
51/2x81/2. 240 pp.
Literary Nonfiction.
August

The Red Freak, The Miracle

“This full arc of life—bigger than imagination in a raging fire—is set on paper by a poet obsessed with beauty, hooves, and the passion of flight. . . . In Lifshin’s language, spare yet metaphorically profound, we enter into that animal grace that only a true poet can convey, as we race on from poem to poem, joining Secretariat in triumph—‘not for a win but a coronation.’”—Laura Chester

AS THE DAYS GET LONGER

the horse dreams
of flying in the air
like a gust of wind
on an abandoned
Christmas tree,
red exploding like
a spurt of light,
flaming wildly like
those boughs of
northern lights
out of darkness

LYN LIFSHIN, a resident of Vienna, Virginia, has published over 140 books, including several from Black Sparrow Books. Her web site, www.lynlifshin.com, shows the variety of her work, from the equine books, The Licorice Daughter: My Year with Ruffian and Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness, to recent books about dance: Ballroom and Knife Edge and Absinthe: the Tango Poems.

978-1-937875-61-9 paper $12.95
978-1-937875-62-6 ebook
51/2x81/2. 160 pp.
Poetry.
May

Selected Poems

In the Night Orchard is a retrospective collection of poems gleaned from over three decades of writing
by a poet absorbed by nature and culture in the American South. These often-narrative poems are
concerned with history, race, indigenous music, the many Southern dialects and customs and the quest
for authentic identity.

Skull , Grim , and Grinning

I forgot how barbed wire snarls—
like a low bird’s nest—caught
the cold raccoon last winter.
He found his own death there,
and each snagged stage of ice,
sun and hungry birds had a say
as weeds blew and I found
human obligations to occupy me.
But after thaw I went walking,
saw a twisted root (spring’s
first threat of snake), red eyeshape
of new sumac leaves,
deer tracks by the hundred,
and on the rotted fence post
polished to blinding shine by sun,
the forgotten relic hung,
a barbed cocoon coiled around
a fanged white flower of bone.

R. T. SMITH is writer-in-residence at Washington & Lee University, where he has edited Shenandoah since 1995.

978-1-937875-65-7 paper $14.95
978-1-937875-66-4 ebook
51/2x81/2. 192 pp.
Poetry.
May

Why He Doesn’t Sleep: The Selected Poems of Stephen Gardner collects the best poetry of an underappreciated writer, an extremely popular professor whose teaching inspired many students to become serious poets themselves. Gardner was known to invest himself in helping others more than in his own work, and so this overdue collection offers exposure to an interesting, variegated, and genuinely passionate writer.

GOING HOME
Down the road, lying with my face
Pressed into my father’s lap, the wheel
He held claiming most of the space.
But I squeezed in, bending up
My knees, with the rest of my form
On the seat and in my mother’s
Lap, not comfortable, but warm.
And they would sing together
Old songs. And I still can feel
Their soft strong hands on me again
And the cold hard turning of the wheel.

STEPHEN GARDNER (1948–2009), a native of Columbia, South Carolina, received his bachelor of arts and master’ of arts in English from the University of South Carolina and earned his doctorate from Oklahoma State University. He was a member of the University of South Carolina Aiken faculty since 1972. His second book of poetry, Taking the Switchback, was published by Texas Review Press in 2008.

978-1-937875-63-3 paper $8.95
978-1-937875-64-0 ebook
51/2x81/2. 112 pp.
Poetry.
February

Basin Ghosts is a chapbook of original poems by Jesse Graves, author of Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine. Many poems in Basin Ghosts address places and themes that resonated in Graves’s first collection, which won both the Weatherford Award and the Appalachian Writers’ Association Book of the Year Award in Poetry. The poems in Basin Ghosts examine life in the rural South, changes that have occurred over generations in communities there, and the ways in which the past lives on through memory and attachment to the land.

Grace Notes

Leora never walked the quarter-mile of red dust
to her bench at Big Sinks schoolhouse
without carrying the hand-sewn satchel
she used for an accordion case.
The notes came to her out of some darkness,
a cavity just inside her ear
where the curve of a sound pushed through
her fingers and into the buttons of that strange machine.
Where did the accordion come from?
The imprint read Vienna Austria 1904
and how it arrived to her in Capps Creek,
Tennessee, the middle of the middle of nowhere
will pass like the mystery of cloudburst,
some graceful symmetry beyond this world
and beyond the next.

JESSE GRAVES is the author of Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine. Graves is also co-editor on Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III.

978-1-937875-53-4 paper $8.95
978-1-937875-54-1 ebook
51/2x81/2. 80 pp.
Poetry.
February

More Than Heavy Rain brings together poems of intense observation culled from a life lived mostly outside. Set mostly around the poet’s home along the Watauga River in northeast Tennessee, the poems also reach out to such distant locations as Montana, Alaska, and post-war Germany. Some of them reconstruct the poet’s childhood in rural West Virginia. Some examine his family history, the events and relatives who helped determine the way he views the world.

LIKE TURNING ON A SWITCH

In a day and a night the leaves of all four
Gingko trees in the courtyard fell,
Fanned out in one direction by a south wind
As if they had been deliberately laid.
Even in half-light they glowed
As if a door had been opened at mid-court
Spilling brightness onto the grass.
But there was no door, no room into which
One might lead, no light to shine out,
Just yellow leaves, four shadow-anchored
Boats, straining to pull away with the tide.

DON JOHNSON is a professor and Poet in Residence at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee, where he has been a member of the faculty for thirty years. Johnson’s poetry publications include The Importance of Visible Scars (1984), Watauga Drawdown (1991), and Here and Gone: New and Selected Poems (2010).

978-1-937875-57-2 paper $8.95
978-1-937875-58-9 ebook
51/2x81/2. 80 pp.
Poetry.
July

The poems of Backmasking uncover secret messages of rock and roll in relation to religion, mostly in a loose sonnet form reminiscent of David Wojahn’s classic, Mystery Train. Set mainly in the Muscle Shoals area of Alabama, these narrative poems, spun in reverse, detail a young man’s ascent into the glittery world of guitar heroes, all the while singing out the day-to-day absurdities of the sacred and the profane.

Fame Studio Session

Muscle Shoals, Alabama 1989

Its history in rock and roll was lost on me
The night that we snuck in. My buddy Jon
Had called a friend who’d let us tape for free.
The evening band had paid, was packed and gone
When we arrived with drums, guitars and Tom—
His blank cassettes would dub our only tune.
I can’t recall who played the bass, or hummed
The hooks and riffs we tracked. So, pretty soon
We called it quits, our demo done. I’d love
To say we felt Aretha’s vibe, or heard
That Wilson Pickett preacher-scream above
Our own pathetic din. But clever words
And chords are not enough. Beside our cars
We lingered in the lot and spoke of stars.

HAROLD WHIT WILLIAMS, who lives in Austin, Texas, is guitarist for the critically acclaimed rock band Cotton Mather, whose album Kontiki has been rated at number 26 of the Top 200 Power Pop Albums of all time.

978-1-937875-76-3 paper $8.95
978-1-937875-77-0 ebook
51/2x81/2. 48 pp.
Poetry.
March

The women of Harvard Square are smart, sassy, and sexy. There's Agnes, who with her boyfriend Maynard provides the inspiration for her best friend Diana’s new play that turns into a steamy, boundary-bending sendup. As for Agnes and Diana, don't even try to imagine their shenanigans. You'll want to meet Agnes's grandmother Abigail, who at eighty-seven is still feisty and more than a little naughty—and Adriana, her daughter and Agnes’s mother, who receives a shocking gift from her old Radcliffe roommate. That’s Olympia, the award-winning novelist, who gets the scare of her life when she decides to set her new novel in Pittsburgh and visits. Did I mention Beverly, the long, tall Texan who came to Harvard for college and never left—and never left Texas behind? Oh, and Henrietta, whose imagination is so outrageous and dark that she will soon get her own novel.

What the women of Harvard Square are saying about Mike Lieberman:

Agnes Lubeck: “Mike Lieberman is a master.”
Diana Endicott: “I’m on board with what he has done. This guy gets it.”
Beverly Ardmore: “He’s nothing but a pimp. It’s all the more outrageous because we're both Texans.”
Abigail Lubeck: “I thought I would be only an old person, Agnes’s creaky grandmother. But he gave me a great role to play, and you know what? He threw in a vibrator as well. He knows how to honor older women.”
Henrietta Markham: “Mike Lieberman gave me more than I deserve. He gave me motive and opportunity as the crime folks say—and with them sex and, well . . . I’ll let you read The Women
of Harvard Square.”

MICHAEL LIEBERMAN is a retired research physician and the author of six books of poems and two previous novels, Never Surrender—Never Retreat and The Lobsterman's Daugher, both published by Texas Review Press. He lives in Houston with his wife, the writer Susan A. Lieberman.

978-1-937875-85-5 paper $12.95
978-1-937875-86-2 ebook
51/2x81/2. 96 pp.
Literary Novel.
October

A mysterious woman comes out of the wheat fields late one night to complicate the life of Chief Ranger Aldo Springer, recently banished to Fort Pawnee National Historical Site in central Kansas. She demands asylum and backs up her demand by threatening to jump from the highest point in the historical site—a crow’s nest halfway up the hundred-foot mast of the fort’s flag pole. Against his judgment, Springer conceals her from the security forces of the state hospital, from which she escaped, and risks everything he cherishes to pursue a murderer along a cold trail.

“In this well-conceived and vivid manuscript, the charming Aldo Springer, Chief Park Ranger at Fort Pawnee National Historic Site in Kansas, is in the awkward position of providing cover for Amanda Lowenthal, a 28-year-old escapee from the Pawnee State Hospital for the criminally insane, who murdered her family when she was fourteen. This is a genuinely successful piece of storytelling and character development. It’s humorous and well-paced and structures plausible scenes of intensity and moments of tenderness.”—Publisher’s Weekly

“Steve Sherwood's finely crafted No Asylum is about escape. Those who escape justice need to be imprisoned. Those in prisons, most often of their own making, need to escape. Aldo Springer, a National Park Service ranger, divorced, banished from his beloved Rocky Mountains to the Fort Pawnee National Historic site in Kansas, and loathed by his superintendent, lives without much hope. Serving time in this purgatory, a particularly hot summer in Kansas, he learns to act on his instincts, broaden his heart, take chances, and escape to the small slice of heaven he can create from truth, trust, and love.”—Thomas Fox Averill

STEVE SHERWOOD won the 2003 TRP George Garrett Fiction Prize with his novel Hardwater. His latest book of stories and personal essays will appear in 2014. Steve is the director of the William L. Adams Center for Writing at Texas Christian University, where he has taught writing courses since 1988.

978-1-68003-000-6 paper $18.95
978-1-68003-001-3 ebook
51/2x81/2. 240 pp.
Fiction.
October

This book traces the evolution of the Browning Automatic Rifle from the Model of 1918, first to face combat in World War I, through its various configurations in all arenas of combat all the way to the present-day 1918 A3 SLR developed and manufactured by Ohio Ordnance Works.

The Browning Automatic Rifle, known simply as the BAR, was a shoulder-fired light machine gun fed by a twenty-round box magazine of 30-06, the same ammunition used by the 1903 Springfield. Weighing in at under twenty pounds, it could easily be carried by one soldier, who could drape a bandolier with twelve magazines over his shoulder, giving him a total of 260 rounds (counting those in the mounted magazine). Generally accompanied by at least one companion carrying an additional bandolier with twelve magazines, the BAR man could exercise some serious firepower. Used sparingly during World War I because of the United States’ late entry into the war, it played a major role during World War II and the Korean Conflict, offering a very reliable combination of rapid fire and penetration. Few weapons of war ever pressed into service have offered the romantic allure of the BAR.

Ohio Ordnance Works, Inc. manufactures a semi-automatic version of this rifle, the 1918 A3, keeping alive this icon of American military weaponry. The only one of its kind in production anywhere in the world, it is manufactured with some of the original USGI WWI and WWII parts. Only the highest quality Ohio Ordnance original and USGI standard parts are used in its production. The heart of the 1918 A3 is the receiver made from 8620 steel casting that has been carburized and induction heat treated. The castings are machined on state-of-the-art CNC machining centers. Every rifle is fully assembled, inspected, test-fired, and re-inspected under the direct supervision of a master armorer.

PAUL RUFFIN is Texas State University System Regents' Professor at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. He is the author of two novels, five collections of stories, five books of essays, and seven collections of poetry. Bob Conroy has worked in the firearms industry for over fifteen years as an employee of Ohio Ordnance Works, Inc., where as vice president he handles sales, marketing, and business development.

978-1-937875-81-7 paper $10.95
978-1-937875-82-4 ebook
6x9. 120 pp.
Military History.
September

The M240 Machine Gun traces the development of the weapon, currently the primary medium-weight machine gun of our military, through the latest configuration, the M240 SLR, designed and manufactured by Ohio Ordnance.

When the United States military determined during the late 1970s that it was time to find a replacement for older machine guns in the services, they initiated an extensive search for a weapon that would fire the 7.62 Nato round and prove economical, adaptable in many configurations, relatively lightweight, accurate, and more reliable than its predecessors. The clear winner was the Belgium-made Fabrique Nationale MAG, later adapted and renamed the M240, a belt-fed 7.62 air-cooled weapon easily adapted for use on ground vehicles, aircraft, and seagoing craft and light enough to be carried and operated by a single soldier. Today the M240 is the primary medium machine gun of our armed forces and of many of our allies across the globe.

“Relatively few fully transferable MAGs are in civilian hands, and the cost of a transferable MAG of any sort is upward of $70,000. Ohio Ordnance Works (OOW) is offering a semi-automatic-only version of the M240 as its M240 SLR (for self-loading rifle). The M240 SLR is a mix of original M240 components and parts designed and manufactured by OOW. The right sideplate, which is the receiver according to the BATFE, is thicker than the military M240 and the interior parts have been reduced accordingly to ensure that fully automatic components cannot be inserted. Further, the SLR cannot accept a military trigger group or operating rod.”—National Rifle Association Staff

PAUL RUFFIN is Texas State University System Regents' Professor at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. He is the author of two novels, five collections of stories, five books of essays, and seven collections of poetry. BOB CONROY has worked in the firearms industry for over fifteen years as an employee of Ohio Ordnance Works, Inc., where as vice president he handles sales, marketing, and business development.

978-1-937875-83-1 paper $8.95
978-1-937875-84-8 ebook
6x9. 80 pp.
Army.
November

Robert Morgan and Kathryn Stripling Byer, Al Maginnes and Cathy Smith Bowers, Thomas Raine Crowe and Michael McFee, as well as many new voices. . . Indeed, the variegation of the Tar Heel State’s landscapes, as well as its rich history, is reflected through the myriad voices of its contemporary verse. As with other volumes of The Southern Poetry Anthology, this book—full of a wide gamut of poetic styles and approaches—will appeal to many readers, prove an excellent teaching resource for North Carolina students of literature, and serve as the definitive poetic document for North Carolina for many years.

Conceived by Series Editor William Wright in 2003, The Southern Poetry Anthology is a projected twelve-to-sixteen volume project celebrating established and emerging poets of the American South, published by Texas Review Press. Inspired by single-volume anthologies such as Leon Stokesbury’s The Made Thing, Gil Allen’s A Ninety-Six Sampler, and Guy Owen and Mary C. Williams’ Contemporary Southern Poetry: an Anthology, The Southern Poetry Anthology aspires to provide readers with a documentary-like survey of the best poetry being written in the American South at the present moment.

Specifically, the editors' goals are twofold: first, to re-establish poetry of the South as a major presence in American literature, and second, to include a greater range of poets from the South to introduce a new poetic geography, a fresh corpus of what we understand to be “Southern Poetry.”

JESSE GRAVES, the author of two collections of poetry released by TRP, is from Johnson City, Tennessee. PAUL RUFFIN is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet who teaches at Sam Houston State University. WILLIAM WRIGHT, editor and poet and editor of this series, is from Marietta, GA.

978-1-937875-87-9 paper $22.95
978-1-937875-88-6 ebook
51/2x81/2. 232 pp.
Poetry.
November

Essays on American Writers

Say It Hot Volume II: Industrial Strength is a collection of essays on American poets, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and issues of interest to artists and academics. A companion volume to Say It Hot, these essays are brutally honest and acutely intelligent.

From the book: “Literary authors these days no longer make livings off their work. Their books are not to be found in bookstores, and the books are rarely printed by major New York publishing houses. No one reads their works except for other literary authors and the professors who are evaluating their tenure and promotion folders at the colleges and universities at which they are employed, and it’s a minor miracle if a literary book from a small press sells a thousand copies. Fiction writers from wealth write about writing or they write about the ridiculous “sufferings” of the rich. Fiction writers from the lower classes write about the primordial filth from which they’ve physically escaped but from which they’ll never mentally be able to leave behind. Like war veterans, people who’ve fought it out in the miasma of poverty and blue-collar hell can never get the stink out of their skins, try as they may. Just like people who haven’t been to war can spot vets who have, middle-class people and the rich can spot people who’ve grown up poor, no matter what their position in life or the quality of their designer suits. Those suits just don’t fit right, and the neckties make them fidget and sweat. What the well-heeled authors and the working-class writers have in common is that they’ve been trained not to pronounce moral judgment.”

ERIC MILES WILLIAMSON is author of three internationally acclaimed novels, a short story collection which won the PEN/Oakland Award, and three books of criticism. He is Fiction Editor of Texas Review, Senior Editor of Boulevard, and Associate Editor of American Book Review. Professor of English at the University of Texas, Pan American, he lives in McAllen, Texas.

978-1-68003-002-0 paper $22.95
978-1-68003-003-7 ebook
51/2x81/2. 296 pp.
Essays.
October

An Ivorybill in Arkansas, which human guilt has conjured up from extinction; mud daubers toting “stunned spiders” to their nests on a screened porch in Louisiana; a whale shark off the Yucatan whose spots tell its story in indecipherable Braille; conchs harvested from an undersea garden in the Caymans; stray dogs in Athens, ancient gods in disguise—the lives of these creatures and others entwine with ours in The Garden of the Fugitives.

Loosely based on the story of Eve, this collection of poems takes the reader from Eden into a fallen world. Exploring the tense relationships between women and men, mothers and daughters, and human beings and other species, these poems lead to Pompeii’s memorial to the “ash people” in The Garden of the Fugitives, where parents and children, inside their husks of plaster, never stop dying to the singing of bees.

WISTERIA

Oozing perfume,
the vine kills exquisitely
in such high style.
The trees have no idea
what’s happening to them.

ASHLEY MACE HAVIRD has published two award-winning chapbooks. She lives in Shreveport, Louisiana.

978-1-68003-006-8 paper $8.95
978-1-68003-007-5 ebook
51/2x81/2. 80 pp.
Poetry.
September

Beauty Strip considers the landscapes and living things of Appalachia, protests the industrialization that leaves ruin in its wake, and celebrates the human capacity to remake, redeem, and find shelters and homes. Part sketchbook, part dreambook, Beauty Strip maps and ruminates on, haunts and is haunted by, the mountaintop removal sites and mill towns, the salt-works and bloomeries, that have scarred the land from West Virginia to Virginia to Tennessee.

Our Lady of the Mills

The painter dodges the filthy clumps,
despises their chilblained faces,
rabbit-eyes, broken teeth. He eases
into the stone church, the one work
he will give them: the virgin, charcoal-lined,
comfort for the people in their hours
at the furnace and the spools.

With paregoric and tonic bitters,
he endures the church’s stained light,
cold arches, and eye-sockets. Empty,
unpainted, the dreadful ovals will tell
what she felt when she touched her son,
cool and rigid as marble awaiting the chisel,
pale as threadbare muslin, spilt cream.

WILLIAM KELLEY WOOLFITT is a resident of Cleveland, Tennessee. He has worked as a camp counselor, bookseller, ballpark peanuts vendor, and teacher of computer literacy to senior citizens. He holds a BA from Fairmont State University, an MA from Hollins University, and an MFA and PhD from Pennsylvania State University.

978-1-68003-010-5 paper $8.95
978-1-68003-011-2 ebook
51/2x81/2. 80 pp.
Poetry.
September

This anthology gathers the strong voices of accomplished poets reaching into and beyond nostalgia to remember, to honor, and to document through figurative imagery their experiences of Mexico and the vibrant border areas before the ravages of narco-violence.

Locals Listen to the Mariachi Band at El Jardin in San Miguel

You see their silhouettes along the stone wall
or arm in arm below the glow of garden lights
huddled like foothills, earth you could plant
maize in.

Cowboy hats and serapes, the smell of beer and
cinnamon churros. You think of family and language
how the music rolls through your hips
to the sweat behind your knees. How it rushes
through you, to a place you still don’t know.

—Lois P. Jones

SARAH CORTEZ, resident of Houston and member of the Texas Institute of Letters, is the author of two poetry collections, How to Undress a Cop and Cold Blue Steel, and winner of the PEN Texas literary award in poetry.

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978-1-68003-005-1 ebook
51/2x81/2. 160 pp.
Poetry.
October

The Gold Piano tells the story of Emerson Wainwright, a young man whose idyllic life in a small North Carolina town is turned upside down after his father is caught on videotape in a homosexual act at the county hospital.

To escape from his hometown and its painful memories, Emerson enrolls at an under-funded historically black college a hundred miles away, attending on a minority grant. As the only white student living on campus, he struggles with his loneliness and his role as an outsider.

His relationship with his roommate, a black activist from Brooklyn, is challenged when Emerson begins to fall in love with Zena, a gifted black artist. The novel’s final scenes bring a quiet but hopeful sense of resolution to Emerson’s quest to define himself and find his place in the world.

STEPHEN MARCH lived in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, until his recent death. An accomplished musician, he
authored a number of books of fiction, among them the novel Hatteras Moon (2013) and a collection of stories,
Tell Him You Saw Me. Armadillo won the TRP Clay Reynolds Novella Prize in 2002.

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978-1-68003-009-9 ebook
51/2x81/2. 312 pp.
Fiction.
December

Lucas has inherited his mother's bakery, as well as her obsession for baking sourdough: a bread conceived by wild strains of yeast, and ripened until its flavor becomes both pungent and startling. Running the family business was a safe bet for Lucas, and a lucrative one at that; but when he finds that his soul has become infused with the same untamable character of the sourdough itself, he discovers that a safe bet can be the most dangerous thing a person can dare to make.

“The masterful way Benjamin Ludwig establishes and stays true to an analogy ultimately sells the integrity of the idea and creates a continuing sense of surprise in a subject that has been exhaustively treated and in two characters who are less than perfect, but who somehow are remarkable in their ordinariness and the genuine passion they find for each other and in their journey of self-discovery. The truth is that I didn’t want to like this story, but Ludwig made me love it by remaining faithful to his characters and allowing them to carry the tale, while they develop and round out into credible and evocative, convincingly empathetic individuals who moved me with the genuineness of their hearts.”—Clay Reynolds, Series Judge

BENJAMIN LUDWIG serves as a teacher-coach and curriculum developer in Dover, New Hampshire. His work appears in peer-reviewed education journals and in small literary magazines. He is also the founder of WriteGuide.com.

978-1-68003-014-3 paper $10.95
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51/2x81/2. 96 pp. Fiction.
November

This collection, Morton’s tenth, is a bold book of poetry delving into risks. It’s the moving forward; the constant discovery of new things. Using a combination of quotes, mythological images, and exquisite metaphors from nature, Morton delivers poems that describe the absolute urgency of giving one’s heart over to life, the burning drive to have faith in the world, the insistence that everything, in its own way, is holy. This book is unfettered joy.

Tending Fires

I wanted to write a sonnet last night,
because that’s what lovers do, but the fire
needed tending, and all I could think of
were your shoulders, and that’s not romantic,
so I put on another log, and thought
about that hot summer day underneath
that oak, when our shoulders brushed, and I
blushed
at the nearness of you, and how we made
love that night . . . still . . . that’s not what I wanted
to write . . . But it’s you; you, my love. You are
my night and my morning, and the hot coals
beneath these logs . . . hear them hiss and whisper
like cicadas—cicadas of the trees,
and the summer, and of all things that burn.

KARLA K. MORTON, resident of Denton and  2010 Texas Poet Laureate, is a member and Councilor of the Texas Institute of Letters.  Described as “one of the most adventurous voices in American poetry,” she is a Betsy Colquitt Award Winner, twice an Indie National Book Award Winner, and is the author of nine books of poetry.

978-1-68003-012-9 paper $8.95
978-1-68003-013-6 ebook
51/2x81/2. 80 pp.
Poetry.
September