Ray McManus – författare

Dark poems struggling to reconcile a haunting loss and troubled present

Selected by Kate Daniels as the winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, Driving through the Country before You Are Born is the first collection of poetry from Ray McManus. The speaker in these poems searches for redemption and solace while navigating from a traumatic loss in the past to a present fraught with violence and self-destruction. The volume chronicles his attempt to glean some measure of forgiveness through acceptance of his own responsibly for his circumstances. The reader is called on to witness family stories without happy endings, landscapes on the verge of collapse, and prophetic visions of horrors yet to come. From these haunting visions, the only viable salvation is rooted in hope that, out of the ruins, there remains the possibility of a fresh beginning.

Found Anew is an anthology of new poetry and prose from writers with strong ties to the Palmetto State that creatively engages with historical photographs found in the digital collections of the University of South Carolina''s South Caroliniana Library. In their eclectic approach to ekphrasis—textual response to the visual—editors R. Mac Jones and Ray McManus have recruited an impressive group of poets and fiction writers, including National Book Award-winning poets Terrance Hayes and Nikky Finney (who provides the foreword); their fellow South Carolina Academy of Authors honorees Gilbert Allen, John Lane, Bret Lott, George Singleton, and Marjory Wentworth; Lillian Smith Award-winner Pam Durban, and others.

These thirty-one pairings of archival images with original creative responses illustrate the breadth and richness of the diverse talents of South Carolina writers. While the digital collections are a much-valued resource for researchers and educators, Found Anew encourages a wider use as a source of inspiration for writers and artists inventing narratives set in and about South Carolina. In coupling the poems and short stories with the images that inspired them, the anthology shows writers gauging unlikely depths in curious photographs that other eyes might pass over without a second glance, conjuring perfect words for the emotion evoked by a particular image, and rendering and reimagining the visual in seemingly disparate but ultimately linked narratives. An instructive model for active, collaborative engagement between creative writers and culturally significant visual prompts, this collection also serves to demonstrate the accessibility and scope of archival photography available through South Caroliniana''s digital collections. Through these creative responses, the images are not recovered or explained—but, rather, found anew.

Contributors: Gilbert Allen, Sam Amadon, Laurel Blossom, Darien Cavanaugh, Phebe Davidson, Pam Durban, Julia Eliot, Worthy Evans, Richard Garcia, Will Garland, Linda Lee Harper, Terrance Hayes, Thomas L. Johnson, R. Mac Jones, Julia Koets, John Lane, Brett Lott, Ed Madden, Jonathan Maricle, Terri McCord, Janna McMahan, Ray McManus, Susan Laughter Meyers, Mark Powell, Michele Reese, Mark Sibley-Jones, George Singleton, Charlene Spearen, Daniel Nathan Terry, Jillian Weise, Marjory Wentworth, William Wright