Download or read book Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine written by Jesse Graves and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-20 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tenth Anniversary Expanded Edition First released in 2011, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine was the debut poetry collection from Tennessee poet Jesse Graves and was awarded the 2011 Weatherford Award in Poetry from Berea College, the Book of the Year in Poetry Award from the Appalachian Writers’ Association, and the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. The poems in Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine take part in many of the traditions of lyric poetry, including elegies for lost loved ones, odes to the beauty of family and the natural world, expressed through a range of poetic forms and techniques. The 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition includes twelve new poems and an introduction by Matthew Wimberley. from “Emissaries” Some mornings when I’m reading early, no light yet but the table lamp, my left hand will run through scales along the spine of the open book. My hands keep their own remembrance buried in fine grooves of flesh. The fingers turn over ignitions, faucets, always attuned to their proper force, knuckles never breaking things unless my brain overpowers them. They’ve discovered spectacular terrains, soft enclosures I can never enter again. I send them ahead as scouts for survey, emissaries that flip the lights in every dark hallway of the future.
Download or read book Basin Ghosts written by Jesse Graves and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-20 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Merciful Days written by Jesse Graves and published by . This book was released on 2020-10 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In language both plainspoken and lyrical, East Tennessee poet Jesse Graves examines the connections that hold people together across generations and against the breaches of time and distance. The landscapes of his native region possess a mythic beauty and Graves writes of the animating force it can become in a poet's imagination. Graves's poems are haunted by the lost futures of lives cut short and by speculative narrations of omens and portents. For all the darkness visible in the world, Graves elevates the great joy of feeding birds, walking in the woods, and sharing a life, sometimes only in memory, with the people we love. Those who have passed on are remembered here and their stories become a source of light. The new work in MERCIFUL DAYS will remind readers why Ron Rash has said, These poems have the music, wisdom, and singular voice of a talent fully realized, and make abundantly clear that Jesse Graves is one of America's finest young poets.
Download or read book The Error of Nostalgia written by Richard Boada and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poems in The Error of Nostalgia explore the relationships between individuals and their natural and urban environments in the American South and South America. These disparate locations serve as sites where, among other things, humans confront the perils of natural catastrophes, expatriation, urbanization, and crises of identity. “Richard Boada’s brilliant and self-torn poems mediate nature and the urbane. Their economies chafe, rousing teargas and vulcanism. They are not nostalgia, but ‘lucidities that appear when one goes home,’ ‘evidence of who we are.’” —Angela Ball “The poems in Richard Boada’s The Error of Nostalgia are quick and tactile, moving through landscapes and histories with the speed of fresh recognition, what Brodsky called the ‘accelerated thinking’ of poetry.” —Jesse Graves author, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine “These poems brim with sonic lushness, with musicality, and with a delicacy that reminds me of James Wright and Louise Glück. However, Boada’s poetry is his own: complex, pulsing, curious, and always surprising.” —William Wright author, Night Field Anecdote and Bledsoe
Download or read book Writing Appalachia written by Katherine Ledford and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2020-02-24 with total page 776 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the stereotypes and misconceptions surrounding Appalachia, the region has nurtured and inspired some of the nation's finest writers. Featuring dozens of authors born into or adopted by the region over the past two centuries, Writing Appalachia showcases for the first time the nuances and contradictions that place Appalachia at the heart of American history. This comprehensive anthology covers an exceedingly diverse range of subjects, genres, and time periods, beginning with early Native American oral traditions and concluding with twenty-first-century writers such as Wendell Berry, bell hooks, Silas House, Barbara Kingsolver, and Frank X Walker. Slave narratives, local color writing, folklore, work songs, modernist prose -- each piece explores unique Appalachian struggles, questions, and values. The collection also celebrates the significant contributions of women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community to the region's history and culture. Alongside Southern and Central Appalachian voices, the anthology features northern authors and selections that reflect the urban characteristics of the region. As one text gives way to the next, a more complete picture of Appalachia emerges -- a landscape of contrasting visions and possibilities.
Download or read book Robert Morgan written by Robert M. West and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-06-08 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than fifty years Robert Morgan has brought to life the landscape, history and culture of the Southern Appalachia of his youth. In 30 acclaimed volumes, including poetry, short story collections, novels and nonfiction prose, he has celebrated an often marginalized region. His many honors include four NEA Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as television appearances (The Best American Poetry: New Stories from the South, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards). This first book on Morgan collects appreciations and analyses by some of his most dedicated readers, including fellow poets, authors, critics and scholars. An unpublished interview with him is included, along with an essay by him on the importance of sense of place, and a bibliography of publications by and about him.
Download or read book The Poetics of American Song Lyrics written by Charlotte Pence and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2012-01-02 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Poetics of American Song Lyrics is the first collection of academic essays that regards songs as literature and that identifies intersections between the literary histories of poems and songs. The essays by well-known poets and scholars including Pulitzer Prize winner Claudia Emerson, Peter Guralnick, Adam Bradley, David Kirby, Kevin Young, and many others, locate points of synthesis and separation so as to better understand both genres and their crafts. The essayists share a desire to write on lyrics in a way that moves beyond sociological, historical, and autobiographical approaches and explicates songs in relation to poetics. Unique to this volume, the essays focus not on a single genre but on folk, rap, hip hop, country, rock, indie, soul, and blues. The first section of the book provides a variety of perspectives on the poetic history and techniques within songs and poems, and the second section focuses on a few prominent American songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Michael Stipe. Through conversational yet in-depth analyses of songs, the essays discuss sonnet forms, dramatic monologues, Modernism, ballads, blues poems, confessionalism, Language poetry, Keatsian odes, unreliable narrators, personas, poetic sequences, rhythm, rhyme, transcription methods, the writing process, and more. While the strategies of explication differ from essay to essay, the nexus of each piece is an unveiling of the poetic history and poetic techniques within songs.
Download or read book Dust Storms May Exist written by Ben Groner III and published by Madville Publishing. This book was released on 2024-05-21 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dust Storms May Exist follows the trajectory of a 10,000-mile road trip, exploring the geography, music, and history of America while mapping its astonishments and disillusionments. Ben Groner III searches for a dead father, wrestles with belief and doubt, yearns for sensuality, and recalls the freedom and loneliness of traveling in South America. Bluegrass and cowboy songs seep across the pages as he moves through canyons, bayous, cornfields, museums, gas stations, dance halls, and memory’s refracting landscapes. These poems are a reckoning with what his country is and could be, a meditation on the palpability of absence, a discovery of the searing border between friendship and love, a realization that longing revolves at the core of all experience.
Download or read book Appalachian Gateway written by George Brosi and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring the work of twenty-five fiction writers and poets, this anthology is a captivating introduction to the finest of contemporary Appalachian literature. Here are short stories and poems by some of the region’s most dynamic and best-loved authors: Barbara Kingsolver, Ron Rash, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Morgan, Lisa Alther, and Lee Smith among others. In addition to compelling selections from each writer’s work, the book includes illuminating biographical sketches and bibliographies for each author. These works encompass a variety of themes that, collectively, capture the essence of Appalachia: love of the land, family ties, and the struggle to blend progress with heritage. Readers will enjoy this book not just for the innate value of good literature but also for the insights it provides into this fascinating area. This book of fiction is an enlightening companion to non-fiction overviews of the region, including the Encyclopedia of Appalachia and A Handbook to Appalachia: An Introduction to the Region, both published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2006. In fact the five sections of this book are the same as those of the Encyclopedia. Educators and students will find this book especially appropriate for courses in creative writing, Appalachian studies and Appalachian literature. Editor George Brosi’s foreword presents an historical overview of Appalachian Literature, while Kate Egerton and Morgan Cottrell’s afterword offers a helpful guide for studying Appalachian literature in a classroom setting. George Brosi is the editor of Appalachian Heritage, a literary quarterly, and, along with his wife, Connie, runs a retail book business specializing in books from and about the Appalachian region. He has taught creative writing, Appalachian studies and Appalachian literature. Kate Egerton is an associate professor of English at Berea College. She has taught Appalachian literature and published scholarship in that field as well as in modern drama. Samantha Cole majored in Appalachian Studies and worked for Appalachian Heritage while a student at Berea College. Morgan Cottrell is a West Virginia native who took Kate Egerton's Appalachian literature class at Berea College.
Download or read book Summoning the Dead written by Randall Wilhelm and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length examination of the award-winning author of poetry and fiction firmly rooted in Appalachia Since his dramatic appearance on the southern literary stage with his debut novel, One Foot in Eden, Ron Rash has continued a prolific outpouring of award-winning poetry and fiction. His status as a regular on the New York Times Best Sellers list, coupled with his impressive critical acclaim—including two O. Henry Awards and the Frank O'Connor Award for Best International Short Fiction—attests to both his wide readership and his brilliance as a literary craftsman. In Summoning the Dead, editors Randall Wilhelm and Zackary Vernon have assembled the first book-length collection of scholarship on Ron Rash. The volume features the work of respected scholars in southern and Appalachian studies, providing a disparate but related constellation of interdisciplinary approaches to Rash's fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The editors contend that Rash's work is increasingly relevant and important on regional, national, and global levels in part because of its popular and scholarly appeal and also its invaluable social critiques and celebrations, thus warranting academic attention. Wilhelm and Vernon argue that studying Rash is important because he encourages readers and critics alike to understand Appalachia in all its complexity and he consistently provides portrayals of the region that reveal both the beauty of its cultures and landscapes as well as the social and environmental pathologies that it continues to face. The landscapes, peoples, and cultures that emerge in Rash's work represent and respond to not only Appalachia or the South, but also to national and global cultures. Firmly rooted in the mountain South, Rash's artistic vision weaves the truths of the human condition and the perils of the human heart in a poetic language that speaks deeply to us all. Through these essays, offering a range of critical and theoretical approaches that examine important aspects of Rash's work, Wilhelm and Vernon create a foundation for the future of Rash studies. Robert Morgan, Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University and author of fourteen books of poetry and nine volumes of fiction including the New York Times bestselling novel Gap Creek, provides a foreword.
Download or read book The World is Charged written by Daniel Westover and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins is the first book to demonstrate the centrality of Gerard Manley Hopkins as an influence among contemporary poets.
Download or read book Imagination and Art Explorations in Contemporary Theory written by Keith Moser and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-07-27 with total page 810 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This transdisciplinary project represents the most comprehensive study of imagination to date. The eclectic group of international scholars who comprise Imagination and Art propose bold and innovative theoretical frameworks for (re-) conceptualizing imagination in all of its divergent forms.
Download or read book The Tears of Things written by Catherine Hamrick and published by Madville Publishing. This book was released on 2025-02-18 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Whatever life hands me—love, land, or loss—a way to acceptance means embracing earthly cycles, authentic connections to others, and the comforting puzzle of words,” says Catherine Hamrick. Processing depression and the loss of her parents, she explores the therapeutic value of nature and poetry in The Tears of Things. This collection charts her movement through changing relationships, landscapes, and gardens in the Midwest and Deep South. Seamus Heaney’s interpretation of The Aeneid’s famous line sunt lacrimae rerum—“there are tears at the heart of things”—underpins Hamrick’s sensibility. Observing seasonal flourishes and decay reminds us that love, joy, longing, sorrow, and gratitude arise from life’s imperfection and brevity.
Download or read book Shadows on Wood written by Lacy Snapp and published by . This book was released on 2021-11-19 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It is time the stone took the trouble to bloom" Paul Celan once wrote, and in Lacy Snapp's visionary poems just about everything does. This is a world of trees, brick, flowers, seed pods, but also ghosts from her past and her family history, and the two define and redefine each other in a way that instill in her-and us-a "cosmic affirmation." Snapp must be considered one of our important new ecological poets who have redefined the scope of ecology as a more encompassing and complex vision of the world, one seen as an "Intricate being made of fire and flight." In lush, flowing lines, she carries us on that flight. I can't think of a more timely poetry for our depleted environment, or for our souls. -Richard Jackson, author of Where The Wind Comes From and Broken Horizons Beyond the elements that bind us to our earthly lives is the ethereal element of time. Whether a reminder of its passing in 15-minute increments from a wormy chestnut clock or in the heartpine measured and dovetailed in the basement for her great-grandmother's coffin, Lacy Snapp's narrative of carpentry shines in her debut chapbook, Shadows on Wood. Each board, each family legend, whorls its own universe: "a cosmic affirmation that I will also continue / to change, evolve as I pull, pull from what's around me... wondering / what future story a two-inch slice of my soul will tell." Snapp gazes into time's grain and rings to see herself more clearly-and invites us to do the same. -Linda Parsons, author of Candescent and This Shaky Earth The images in Lacy Snapp's indelible Shadows on Wood immerse readers into the grains and textures of various woods and the memories and associations they invoke. Such poems as "Heartpine" and "Wormy Chestnut" guide us through the deep lineage of labor as we get to know a young woman who learns woodworking as a centerpiece of her family's legacy. In other poems, like "Becoming a Ghost," we are drawn into the contemporary life of a speaker who moves through the world with her own unseen companions. Lacy Snapp knows shadows and wood the way painters know the delicacy or coarseness of their brush tips. She conveys her perceptions through exquisite detail and piercing emotion- beauty and heartbreak walk hand-in-hand here and their impact will linger long after this book has been read, set aside, and then read again. -Jesse Graves, Author of Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine and Merciful Days
Download or read book Oblivion Banjo written by Charles Wright and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The selected works of one of our finest American poets The thread that dangles us between a dark and a darker dark, Is luminous, sure, but smooth sided. Don’t touch it here, and don’t touch it there. Don’t touch it, in fact, anywhere— Let it dangle and hold us hard, let it flash and swing. —from “Scar Tissue” Over the course of his work—more than twenty books in total—Charles Wright has built “one of the truly distinctive bodies of poetry created in the second half of the twentieth century” (David Young, Contemporary Poets). Oblivion Banjo, a capacious new selection spanning his decades-long career, showcases the central themes of Wright’s poetry: “language, landscape, and the idea of God.” No matter the precise subject of each poem, on display here is a vast and rich interior life, a mind wrestling with the tenuous relationship between the ways we describe the world and its reality. The recipient of almost every honor in poetry—the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize, to name a few—and a former poet laureate of the United States, Wright is an essential voice in American letters. Oblivion Banjo is the perfect distillation of his inimitable career—for devout fans and newcomers alike.
Download or read book A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee written by Davy Crockett and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even as a pup, Davy Crockett "always delighted to be in the very thickest of danger." In his own inimitable style, he describes his earliest days in Tennessee, his two marriages, his career as an Indian fighter, his bear hunts, and his electioneering. His reputation as a b'ar hunter (he killed 105 in one season) sent him to Congress, and he was voted in and out as the price of cotton (and his relations with the Jacksonians) rose and fell. In 1834, when this autobiography appeared, Davy Crockett was already a folk hero with an eye on the White House. But a year later he would lose his seat in Congress and turn toward Texas and, ultimately, the Alamo.
Download or read book The Reapers Are the Angels written by Alden Bell and published by Holt Paperbacks. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zombies have infested a fallen America. A young girl named Temple is on the run. Haunted by her past and pursued by a killer, Temple is surrounded by death and danger, hoping to be set free. For twenty-five years, civilization has survived in meager enclaves, guarded against a plague of the dead. Temple wanders this blighted landscape, keeping to herself and keeping her demons inside her heart. She can't remember a time before the zombies, but she does remember an old man who took her in and the younger brother she cared for until the tragedy that set her on a personal journey toward redemption. Moving back and forth between the insulated remnants of society and the brutal frontier beyond, Temple must decide where ultimately to make a home and find the salvation she seeks. “Alden Bell provides an astonishing twist on the southern gothic: like Flannery O'Connor with zombies.” —Michael Gruber, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Air and Shadows
