Stephen F. Austin State University Press – förlag

Never Without Honor features essays written in Memory of Ben H. Procter, a beloved mentor and friend who taught many people most of what they know about the practice of history, and even more about life. Historians, particularly those who practice their craft through appointments in higher education, fall into distinct categories: those known for publications; those who concentrate on teaching; and those who excel in teaching and sharing the yield of their research with others through spoken and written words. Ben Procter’s record places him firmly in the latter camp. His book, Not Without Honor: The Life of John H. Reagan, published by The University of Texas Press in 1962, remains the definitive biography of this Texas surveyor, political leader, and postmaster general of the Confederacy.

Whether silently coveting the birthday gifts of a privileged classmate, trying to connect with a mother’s ghost-like presence, or interrogating the dehumanizing impulse of an Arizona minuteman, the speaker of these poems often finds himself on the “wrong” side of the border that delineates a space of belonging, marginalized or estranged from his surroundings, observing the Other with a sense of both awe and bewilderment.  As such, the poems invite the reader to consider the relationship between life observed and life lived, between detachment and experience, between at-homeness and exile.  In the poem “Backlit”, for example, the speaker is transfixed by the darkening silhouette of a loved one standing before a window, this presence becoming an absence in the shape of a human body; he thinks to speak but doesn’t, foreshadowing the final poem about an intimate friend coming to terms with his imminent mortality through the quiet contemplation of an possum’s skeleton.  These poems, navigating a landscape marked by political, physical, and emotional trauma, ultimately point to the potential of the sensual self – of touch – to transcend the limits of language.

Sudden Loss of Dignity represents where Gary Soto is in his life. He finds himself positioned in life as the older gent, or old guy. His poetry mirrors his personality, snarky and full of mockery. Soto writes about mainly aging and the loss of one’s dignity as the years pass. It’s very funny, poignant, sad, and especially true.

Wrestling the Bear is a first collection of nineteen stories.  Many of the stories deal with synchronicity – the remarkable moments of coincidence when lives collide.  The characters represent a range:  male, female, young, and old, including dead Elvis, Jimmy Hoffa and the Emperor of New York City.  The stories reveal webs of entanglement and often redemption.The stories are tinged with the surreal.  Their settings work as characters whether it is an unnamed island of Central America, Brooklyn, or the streets of Detroit and its surrounding working class suburbs.Sirotkin writes with poetic language and rhythm, reflecting her background in poetry and performance.

The Edge of Known Things is a declaration of reverence, a communication from a nontraditional prophet attempting to both explore and adore the world. What some flinch away  from is held up for examination in these poems, poked at with a stick, as the narrator seeks to understand the line between what is already understood and what is hidden. Returning often to the issue of memory—what we know, what we think we recall, what actually happened, what was dreamed, imagined or pretended—the poems rotate on deep images in an attempt to separate comprehension from mystery.

Scott presents readers with an in-depth look at the Great Depression by providing gripping memoirs from those who experienced it firsthand.

A middle class Italian family finds reason to immigrate to America when  Italy is threatened by the Red Brigades’ terrorist movement of the  1970s. The family patriarch manages a transfer to the United States,  certain of better prospects and of a more secure future for his family,  but each of the family members experiences a deeper kind of upheaval,  negotiating personal losses and estrangement. A grandmother, a mother,  and a granddaughter each discovers the many insidious ways in which war  warps and defines life, even at a distance of decades.

With Loose Change, James E. Cherry explores those things that  make us human. These poems are visceral, honest and possess a vulnerability that will allow you access into the world each day.  In  this collection of verse, very little is exempt from examination.   Family, politics, race, art, aging and much more are placed under the  poet’s mircoscopic eye to be clearly defined.  But these are more than mere analytical explorations. Its Cherry’s ability to interpret those findings and how they have impacted his life that moves this work beyond  the personal into the universal. He has managed to take the pedestrian and left us with a remarkable second collection of poetry.  From the discordant aspects of his life, a melodious solo rises. You’ll continue to pat your feet long after the final page is finished.

The stories in See Spot Run: Lessons for Life are based upon observations and incidences with Glenda Walker’s spot dogs, with the exception of “Swallowing the Bone to Eat the Cats,” which was based upon a tale told by a friend of Glenda’s, Ginger Koppersmith, involving her dog. All the “lessons learned” have their roots in psychological theories, principles, and observations from her clinical practice.

Rebecca Hoogs digs down into the depths of humanity in her newest collection of poetry, Self-Storage. She tells stories of myth, self-portrait, and understanding. With poignant language and beautiful subject matter, Hoogs connects with her audience on a personal level.

Christopher Buckley investigates the large, unanswerable questions that have dogged humanity since the Beginning. Often the seascapes along the California coast toss their debris of ontological doubts upon the shores of his writing . . . uncertainties  concerning God, the human condition, the limits of our knowing, and the  universe.Buckley’s poetry provides readers with the constant blending of beautiful language and stirring content. Full of emotion, Varieties of Religious Experience promises to deliver meaningful messages.

I originally started out to write down a few of my family’s tales for our current generation, but the Piney Woods kept butting in. That is, telling only about family would be about like serving black-eyed peas without cornbread. So, while this memoir is built around my family’s tales and history, the Piney Woods lore and way of life, dating back to the earliest settlers, get their share of attention.Most of the tales in these pages are cheerful since we were, and are, a jolly bunch. The grownups passed lots of the stories along as we sat on the porch or in front of the fireplace. They wedged in other shorter tales as folks took a break from work (often in my family) in the shade of the black gum tree.

By day, Tiff Proulx works as a living statue, posing as the Statue of Liberty for the French Quarter’s tourist trade in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. By night, she descends into the darkness costumed as the Angel of Mercy, defending and protecting the storm refugees from the thugs who pock the city’s wayward streets. But her acts of heroism are no accident: Tiff’s days as an innocent college student came to an abrupt end after a National Guardsman, pretending to be a Good Samaritan, raped her during the height of the storm’s fury.Tiff’s skills as a living statue include extraordinary stealth and an uncanny ability to render herself completely motionless. Using these “powers,” she transforms herself into a vigilante hero, combing the Quarter to fight evil and injustice, as well as to hunt down the man who plunged her life into despair during the storm’s darkest hours.

Civilizing the Texas Frontier traces the lives of Mr. and Mrs. James Lowry Smith, Amarillo pioneers when the population of that city was just two hundred. The story begins in Salado, Texas, and Horn Lake, Mississippi where they spent their early lives; then focuses on their meeting and subsequent engagement in Colorado City; and ends with their immense contributions to the spiritual, cultural, business, and social growth of the Queen City of the Plains. The book is thematically tied to the numerous evolving civilizing events of the Texas frontier including the advent of telephone and postal service and the west Texas roots of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the formation of the largest wholesale grocery business of the time.

Deviants is about transgression and transcendence, about passing as a man or a woman, as gay or straight, about passing through unseen, passing by without stopping to help, passing over the threshold, passing from innocence, passing from life.The deviants in this book are the many masks we wear, the loners and flirts, the worriers and snarlers; they can be found in the deviant use of ancient forms. These poems are beautiful and meaningfully interactive, clear and accessible on their own, but become even richer in meaning as they are understood in the context of poetic tradition. Kline’s words stick both in the mind and the craw.They engage powerfully with tradition while deviating into contemporary concerns in a contemporary idiom, while challenging the easy relationship between speaker and reader through the use of shifting personae whose designs on the reader are slippery and sometimes adversarial, in the tradition of Browning, Pound, and Plath.

The Weight of the Weather: Regarding the Poetry of Ted Kooser is a comprehensive examination of the former US Poet Laureate’s long-time contribution to American letters. For many years, Kooser’s work, while well-regarded among regional audiences in the Midwest and Great Plains, had been considered quaint and provincial by readers elsewhere. This attitude largely changed circa 1980 with the publication of Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems, when Kooser’s work began to receive national readership.In this new critical study, Mark Sanders, a long-time critic, publisher, and supporter of Great Plains poetry, compiles a comprehensive overview and evaluation of Kooser’s poetic legacy. The Weight of the Weather gathers numerous criticisms, book reviews, reflections, and interviews that span Kooser’s long poetic career, including work by a number of critics and fellow poets—Dana Gioia, David Baker, and Jonathan Holden among them. The book endeavors to balance early appraisals of Kooser’s work, from 1980 and before, through his contemporary success and popularity.Kooser, a Presidential Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA, served as US Poet Laureate from 2004–2006; among his many collections of poetry is Delights & Shadows which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Long-noted for his poetry’s accessibility, clarity, and precision, Kooser’s poetry has too often been compartmentalized as regional or pastoral; The Weight of the Weather changes that perspective. Indeed, Kooser’s work is universally American, deeply ingrained in the poetic traditions of Whitman, Frost, Williams, Stafford, and Stevens.

Many books have been written about the superintendency and all aspects of it. Additionally, “standards for superintendents” have been written by the American Association for School Administrators (AASA). These eight standards deal with Leadership and District Culture, Policy and Governance, Communications and Community Relations, Organizational Management, Curriculum Planning and Development, Instructional Management, Human Resource Management, and Values and Ethics of Leadership.States have standards that mirror these. Texas, for example, put the standards into three domains: Leadership of the Educational Community; Instructional Leadership; and Administrative Leadership. Within these three domains are listed the eight competencies which reflect AASA’s eight standards. Daily Devotions for Superintendents covers many of the standards but really hones in on Competency 1 which read, “The superintendent knows how to act with integrity, fairness, and in an ethical manner in order to promote the success of all students.”Containing 366 devotionals written to challenge, encourage, and to daily feed the superintendents as they face the many different situations in their personal lives and in the schools under their leadership, Daily Devotions for School Superintendents looks at all areas of the superintendency and provides daily devotionals from every book in the Bible. In addition, each daily verse is followed with powerful reflections to clearly illustrate and drive the principles home. All verses are taken from the King James version of the Bible and uncover God’s presence, power, and provision for directing superintendents in their daily activities.

According to the preface to Don Welch’s latest collection of poems, “Gnomes” are defined as: short expressions, from a word meaning judgment, opinion, purpose; of, or pertaining to, someone originally Greek, especially a poet. A species of diminutive beings, usually shriveled old men who troll interiors, guarding earth’s treasures.This is an apt description of Welch’s book, indeed. The senior poet of Nebraska and the Great Plains, Don Welch may sardonically regard himself as the “shriveled old man” who both explores the Plains’ interiors and, by writing about them, becomes the protector of the earth’s treasures.The gnomes in this collection are beautiful little crystals of verse, reminiscent of the brevity of ancient Chinese poetry but purposefully armed with the occidental twists of language and experience that only someone immersed and baptized in the spirit of the local can wield. Welch’s poems are vertical moments for our busy horizontal lives. They are like pendants of beaded water, their careful silences speaking loudly through our din.

Theories of Decentralization and Local Government brings fresh perspective to the debate and comparative analysis of vertical division of power; i.e. processes of decentralization and relations between central and local (self) governments. The multiple author book is not just one of many similar around the globe, as it encompasses contributions from many different academics from not only different countries, but also different continents and even more importantly, very different political traditions and cultures. This way, the book deepens and strengthens knowledge of the role of local governments in the contemporary world, and brings new value to discussions on the relationship between decentralization and development.Contributors include: Ahmed Mustafa Elhussein Mansour, Hong Pang, Abdulfattah Yaghi, Jose Neftali Recinos, Gariela Miranda-Recinos, Lee Payne, Heather Wyatt Nichol, Ed Gibson, James Newman, Kwame Asamoah, Minerva Cruz, and Alexandra Tsvetkova.

2:12 a.m. is an insomniac’s tour of counterproductive bedtime stories, Vegas weddings, Southern funerals, Nevada’s nuclear testing grounds, Patty Hearst, Marina Oswald, sleepwalking murderers, Louise Bourgeois’s Insomnia Drawings and more, revealing what wakeful nights conjure for a North Carolinian turned Californian, a farm child turned suburbanite, a 1960s romantic turned fatalist and a once-but-no-longer “gifted” sleeper.The collection, comprised of Best American Essays notables, Pushcart Prize nominees and the winner of Drunken Boat’s Editors’ Choice nonfiction award, mixes the strictly autobiographical with voice-driven reportage and includes essays that are factual, meditative, investigatory and lyrical to take full advantage of the versatility of the form. 2:12 a.m. is a book for all who revisit the past and brood on the future—a book about the dislocations of contemporary life, the hauntings of memory, and the perennial search, late night or otherwise, for meaning in existence.

Always the Detail represents the nuances of relationships. Barbara Schmitz writes about daily life, bringing to life such intricate encounters as animals and plants, mineral and liquids. Schmitz leaves no stone unturned. With beautiful imagery and astounding cadences, Schmitz comes to life in her poetry.

Bauer's poems probe the dark landscapes between impression and apprehension, the past, and its repetition through imaginative transformation, impulse, and restraint. Her delivery is tough and terse; her imagery is fresh and often startling. Her poems are poignant, intelligent, and believable.

Little Heretic presents one person’s pilgrimage back to the New York of his youth, where the City is seen not for the ghosts of junkies, musicians and ex-lovers that haunt it, but for the spiritual and creative possibility lurking in alleys and parks, and celebrated by street corner buskers and subway graffiti. A twenty-first century poet in New York, this book looks at how in the right light of a Manhattan morning, a pigeon flying across First Avenue just might be one of Rilke’s angels.

In Sheep Can Recognize Individual Human Faces, the poet confronts questions of mortality in meditative poems that revolve around people in his life that he has known and loved.

Fire Season is set on a US Forest Service firefighting crew stationed in Southern California and working throughout the West in the mid-1960’s. A significant presence in the West, the US Forest Service is little treated in fiction. Many readers have no exposure to the role of the Forest Service in firefighting beyond some gauzy notion of smokejumpers, lookouts, and Smokey the Bear. Yet since WW II, tens of thousands of seasonal firefighters have been the primary line of defense against forest fires of increasing ecological, economic, and human cost. Fire Season focuses on the paradigm for fire crews, an elite hotshot crew specially trained for explosive California chaparral fires. In its fidelity to the physical, emotional, and social world of one of these crews, Fire Season offers an account of the fiery intersection of the human and the natural world—an ongoing encounter that has decisively shaped the natural history—and, therefore, the human history—of the West.

Heaven's Messengers begins with the death of six young people—three in Mexico, two in the United States, and one in Spain.All are admitted to heaven by St. Peter and given special assignments to interview six important personages in the conquest of Mexico: Hernando Cortés, Pedro de Alvarado, and Martín López (the last far less well known, but he was a master carpenter and boat builder who constructed thirteen small vessels that were launched on Lake Texcoco and provided a naval component that proved vitally important to the success of the conquest); Doña Marina and Isabel Moctezuma, both Aztec women); and Leonor Cortés Moctezuma. The six messengers are miraculously returned to life and placed in the century of conquest with specific assignments—to illustrate how three men steeped in Roman Catholicism and three pagan women become worthy.

“Kathleene West’s poetry is unflinchingly raw, honest, and emotional; West does not forget her feminist roots or her predecessors in verse: Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Her poetry, hard and unforgiving as the Plains territory it springs from, takes the reader places unexpected, into familiarities and descriptions of people, art, and encounters that only West pulls off so well. Her poetry has always been revolutionary, and, sadly, this last book is evidence of a voice that had places left to go. As her long-time editor and friend in poetry, I respected and admired her bravery to explore her uncomfortable world and the pain that her poetry must have often caused her.”—Mark Sanders, editor, Sandhills Press

People expect that their lives move in majestic sweeps, but that’s only because memory and legend work that way, but reality works in the small moments of our experience. Too Heavy to Carry explores those moments by focusing in close. This wonderful collection aims to name the evils that people live through: loneliness, betrayal, inadequacy, and loss. Dixon easily captures not just the glimpse of hope, but shows the agony and obstacles one must endure before she crawls out of the bottom of the well.This is a must for survivors of any variety—divorce, depression, domestic violence, abandonment/neglect and other painful experiences.

Maps & Destinations celebrates the large and small events of life through story, myth, and the contemplation of other works of art. Deep in the phenomenology of time and place, the poems are as evocative as they are telling. Theirs is a lyricism grounded in the story of maturation and growth and celebrate the power of the imagination and the wonder of art. Lyrical and sensual, they remind us of life’s brevity while reminding us to embrace the joy our world offers.