Driving Through the Country Before You Are Born

Ray McManus received his M.F.A. in poetry and his Ph.D. in composition and rhetoric from the University of South Carolina. His poems have appeared in Nimrod, Crazyhorse, Jabberwock, Natural Bridge, Los Angeles Review, Cold Mountain Review, and other journals and anthologies. McManus is the winner of the 1997 Academy of American Poets Award, the 2000 James Dickey Award in Poetry, and a 2002 Academy of South Carolina author's fellowship. He teaches writing at the University of South Carolina and is cofounder of Split P Soup, a poetry-writing initiative.

Ray McManus's incantatory rhythms, his catalogs of nouns (and sometimes verbs), carry us into the liminal territory between experience and music, which is to say, the territory of dream. - Susan Ludvigson, author of Sweet Confluence: New and Selected Poems and Escaping the House of Certainty ""The poetry in Ray McManus's first collection is touched by a light hand that points to and illuminates its sparkling surfaces and deep interior spaces. The work searches out, mourns, and celebrates place, family, love, and death - at all times asserting the continuity between what can be seen and what must be imagined.... This book is full of fervor and grace and is driven by a fierce regard for language and an understated moral vision. A terrific debut."" - Eamonn Wall, author of Refuge at DeSoto Bend and From the Sin-e Cafe to the Black Hills