Bücher der Reihe Southern Messenger Poets

In Moth, Jane Springer uses shaped poems, prose poems, and poems with unusual structures to soar through time and the natural world. Yet, while her lines are aesthetically playful, she examines serious subjects.

In Ghostlight, a long-awaited second collection of original poems by Ryan Wilson, considers the haunting of the contemporary mind. With virtuosic formal variety and masterful craft, these poems range from rural America to Italy to the Holy Land, as they chronicle the dynamism of a spiritual odyssey toward the eternal through both past and present. Wilson employs sonnets, Pindaric and ballad stanzas, alliterative hemistichs in imitation of the Anglo-Saxon, and other ancient forms to enlighten the modern experience, from smartphones and Facebook to jumbo jets, entangled in a reciprocal relationship with myths, sacred literature, and traditions. Revealing that the past and the everlasting can inform the present at any given moment, In Ghostlight conveys how a vision acknowledging this dual illumination helps us understand ourselves and others in our fraught, complex era.

Alabama focuses on a boy from a rural, fundamentalist community who becomes a pacifist, feminist, and existentialist poet. Labyrinth, meditation, fable, and peasant poem, formed from interleaved strands of prose vignettes and lineated poetry, this collection is at once a tale of cultural exile and familial loyalty, and an unflinching look at regional shame that doubles as a love story, all expressed with the intimate voice and vision of Rodney Jones.

Moving effortlessly from Virginia to Italy and beyond, Ron Smith's new volume responds with a range of emotions from humor to horror and with a variety of forms from the sonnet to visually expressive organic shapes. The book's forty-three pieces gather themselves into three flights that hover above and touch down among the politics of memory and the psychology of beauty. With inspiration drawn from memoir, myth, history, fiction, and the visual arts, That Beauty in the Trees presents, ponders, and sometimes judges the actions, fates, and aesthetics of not only the author's friends and family but also legendary and historical figures, including Achilles, Catullus, George Washington, Edgar Allan Poe, H.D., Ezra Pound, and many more.

Gathers a chorus from the storytelling working classes of the Upper South. In narrative poems made of sinewy, Whitmanesque lines, Bobby Rogers composes portraits of dwellers in the small towns, unincorporated communities, and hard-edged cities they have flown to, always packing their past with them, an inheritance as ephemeral as vapour.

With graceful lines swooping like a bird in flight, Claudia Emerson's newest collection explores the harsh realities of aging and the limitations of the human body, as well as the loneliness, fear, and anger that can accompany us as we live.

In poems that confront a region indelibly shaped by environmental turmoil, economic erasure, and the weight of an outside world intent on destroying it, Daniel Boone's Window works to reclaim and reckon with the realities and complexities of Appalachia.

Poet and novelist Ashley Mace Havird confronts global and personal change. Her subjects range from the extinction of a prehuman species to the present-day reduction in sea life due to the climate crisis. Closer to home, she confronts the death of her father and her own aging.

A collection that explores the interplay of human consciousness and objective reality, always in celebration of the imaginative spirit that brings them into a productive and often spiritual conversation.

In his latest collection of poems, Ron Houchin replies with sensitivity and wit to things noticed or sensed, offering a celebration of sights, sounds, and objects that elicit responses through the phenomena of their being.

Prolific poet and novelist David Huddle reflects on turning seventy-six years of age and records his aghast reactions to changes brought about by the current president of the United States. Huddle embraces the potential of poetry to use intelligence, wit, language, knowledge, and sense of form to move toward useful revelations.

The poems of In the Months of My Son's Recovery inhabit the voice and point of view of the mother of a heroin addict who enters recovery. With clear perception and precise emotional tones, Kate Daniels explores recovery experiences from multiple, evolving vantage points.

A second collection of autobiographical "memory poems" by David Kirby. Kirby confides in narrative poems the events he actually or vicariously experienced - as a child, a teen, a young man - as well as some future scenes he imagines. Little Richard, Henry James and others all feature.

A poetic study of the eternal, T.R. Hummer's new collection Eon, as with the other volumes in this trilogy, Ephemeron and Skandalon, offers meditations on the brief arc of our existence, death, and beyond.

Over nearly fifty years, Eleanor Ross Taylor has established herself as one of the foremost southern poets of her generation. Captive Voices gathers selections from Taylor's five previous books along with a generous helping of new poems.

Betty Adcock brings fierce insight to her seventh poetry collection, Rough Fugue. Her elegant stanzas evoke bygone moments of beauty, reflection, and rage. "Let things be spare," she writes, "and words for things be thin / as the slice of moon / the loon's cry snips."

Greg Alan Brownderville's third collection of poetry employs inventive phrasing and vivid imagery to construct a particular life marked by religion, confused by desire, dulled by alcohol, and darkened by death. But Brownderville also skilfully uses humour to soften the disquieting images that haunt these stanzas.

Bobby Rogers's second collection, Social History, listens hard to the voices of American characters and celebrates the gestures of ordinary life. The long lines of his narrative poems trace the undulations of southern speech, and his careful eye for detail reflects the influence of generations of storytellers.

Through silence and song, death and rebirth, a sense of wonder pervades every minute of our lives. In The Man Who Saws Us in Half, Ron Houchin explores this idea from the first curiosities of childhood to the gradual skepticism that comes with age and the weight of practical concerns.

A bold, brassy, yet delicate vision of a woman's growth. Imbued with a unique poetic voice that is utterly feminist, these poems possess a fiery intensity for those abuses no woman can ever quite recover from, but also reveal the loving, forgiving temperament of the mother no woman can do without.

Spiraling between the tenses of time, David Huddle creates in these vibrant poems a defense against the encroachment of age through the resources of language and memory, imagination and art. Moments recollected, and admittedly embellished, from his own life and family seem appealingly familiar.

A woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. The most personal of Claudia Emerson's poetry collections, Late Wife is both an elegy and a celebration of a rich present informed by a complex past.

The title of Ron Smith's new collection comes from Yeats's observation that creators "must go from desire to weariness and so to desire again, and live but for the moment when vision comes to our weariness like terrible lightning, in the humility of the brutes."

Celebrated poet Julie Kane returns to her Boston Irish Catholic roots in this collection about mothers and daughters shaped by the forces of Irish history and Irish-American culture. Kane confronts how the legacy of personal trauma gets passed down to subsequent generations, with a focus on women from her family history.