J. Bruce Fuller - Böcker

How to Drown a Boy, a debut collection of poems by J. Bruce Fuller, investigates how boyhood and fatherhood entwine to create cycles that mimic decaying and dangerous natural surroundings. The woods, the water, the oil rigs, and the men who work them all have a powerful effect on the speaker from childhood through adulthood. These poems examine the weight of family and culture against a backdrop of climate change and environmental disaster.

Home to extraordinary writers such as William Styron, Tom Wolfe, and Ellen Glasgow, the state of Virginia’s literary past is among the most prolific in the nation. Indeed, this state, with its beautiful and varied ecosystems—Appalachia, Chesapeake Bay, the Shenandoah Valley, and Virginia’s beautiful beaches, just to name a few—seem to serve as the landscapes from which equally varied and nutritive writers spring, from the lyrical, often ecstatic meditations of Charles Wright to the poignant, dynamic narratives and lyrics of Ellen Bryant Voigt, from the moving narratives of Rita Dove to the formal mastery and wit of R. T. Smith. Series Editor William Wright, along with Volume Editors J. Bruce Fuller, Jesse Graves, and Amy Wright, have collaborated to bring readers a wide-ranging survey in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume IX: Virginia. This volume seeks to emphasize the uniqueness of the poetic voices of Virginia. In doing so, the editors have acknowledged and included many celebrated writers from the recent past as well as relatively new, diverse voices that reiterate the literary fecundity of one of the most beautiful, revered, and complicated states in the American South.

Alabama has a storied history: Fewer than ten generations ago, Alabama was owned by the Spanish (who claimed Mobile until 1813), then the British, and then the United States, after failing to secede into a Confederacy. Following the Civil War, Alabama suffered economic collapse and depended on the few crops it could sell or export to exist as a unified state. Today, the state thrives, but its troubled history has left a mark that, with hope, fades with time, compassion, and understanding.Alabama is among the most naturally dynamic states in the nation, its ecosystems ranging from Appalachian mountains, through rolling Piedmont, to the vast Gulf Shore.In this tenth volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology, the editors have achieved a remarkable task; they have revealed another wide variegation that makes Alabama so dynamic: poets in the Yellowhammer State with both established and new voices. They have elucidated the impressive and exciting diversity of poets who consider or have considered Alabama home.