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Intimate, urgent, and relentlessly inventive, the poems in Ghostlit reflect upon mythology and feminist pop culture and contemporary ideology as they may become embedded in the psyches and even the bodies of their inheritors. Through visceral and sometimes gothic-inspired images, mythological allusions, and the assemblage of strands of narrative, the poems in this collection chart the ways in which manipulative emotional strategies on individual and cultural levels inflict lingering harm upon minds and bodies. Throughout, the poems peel back the layers of what it means for an abuse survivor to reclaim a sense of self—long after the damage has been done. “It turns out that the years I believed myself lucky/were partly responsible for my thinking/there was something deeply wrong with me” could be understood as a refrain for the speaker in Ghostlit or as a shorthand for a cautionary tale about how many survivors may be encouraged to deny the reality of abuse.

“The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III, second edition, edited with passion and precision, in collaboration with Texas Review Press, transcends the stereotypes surrounding Appalachia, revealing the true diversity and complexity of Appalachia’s poetic voices. Commitment to showcasing the rich and rewarding literary landscape reflects the evolving spirit of this beautiful region. This anthology serves as a testament to the resilience and beauty found in the works of Appalachian poets, painting a vivid picture of a culture that defies easy categorization. Through carefully selected poems, this edition weaves a tapestry that is as vibrant as it is complicated, offering readers a deeper understanding of Appalachia’s multifaceted identity: nuances, complexities, and sheer beauty that define Contemporary Appalachia. Embark on a literary journey that honors tradition while embracing the contemporary, as The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III, invites readers to explore the heart and soul of a region that defies stereotypes and resonates with authenticity.” - William Wright, Series Editor

A mysterious woman comes out of the wheat fields late one night to complicate the life of Chief Ranger Aldo Springer, recently banished to Fort Pawnee National Historical Site in central Kansas.  She demands asylum and backs up her demand by threatening to jump from the highest point in the historical site—a crow’s nest halfway up the hundred-foot mast of the fort’s flag pole.  Against his judgment, Springer conceals her from the security forces of the state hospital, from which she escaped, and risks everything he cherishes to pursue a murderer along a cold trail. “In this well-conceived and vivid manuscript, the charming Aldo Springer, Chief Park Ranger at Fort Pawnee National Historic Site in Kansas, is in the awkward position of providing cover for Amanda Lowenthal, a 28-year-old escapee from the Pawnee State Hospital for the criminally insane, who murdered her family when she was fourteen. This is a genuinely successful piece of storytelling and character development. It’s humorous and well-paced and structures plausible scenes of intensity and moments of tenderness.”—Publisher’s Weekly “Steve Sherwood's finely crafted No Asylum is about escape.  Those who escape justice need to be imprisoned.  Those in prisons, most often of their own making, need to escape.  Aldo Springer, a National Park Service ranger, divorced, banished from his beloved Rocky Mountains to the Fort Pawnee National Historic site in Kansas, and loathed by his superintendent, lives without much hope. Serving time in this purgatory, a particularly hot summer in Kansas, he learns to act on his instincts, broaden his heart, take chances, and escape to the small slice of heaven he can create from truth, trust, and love.”—Thomas Fox Averill

Say It Hot Volume II: Industrial Strength is a collection of essays on American poets, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and issues of interest to artists and academics. A companion volume to Say It Hot, these essays are brutally honest and acutely intelligent.From the book: “Literary authors these days no longer make livings off their work. Their books are not to be found in bookstores, and the books are rarely printed by major New York publishing houses. No one reads their works except for other literary authors and the professors who are evaluating their tenure and promotion folders at the colleges and universities at which they are employed, and it’s a minor miracle if a literary book from a small press sells a thousand copies. Fiction writers from wealth write about writing or they write about the ridiculous “sufferings” of the rich. Fiction writers from the lower classes write about the primordial filth from which they’ve physically escaped but from which they’ll never mentally be able to leave behind. Like war veterans, people who’ve fought it out in the miasma of poverty and blue- collar hell can never get the stink out of their skins, try as they may. Just like people who haven’t been to war can spot vets who have, middle-class people and the rich can spot people who’ve grown up poor, no matter what their position in life or the quality of their designer suits. Those suits just don’t fit right, and the neckties make them fidget and sweat. What the well-heeled authors and the working-class writers have in common is that they’ve been trained not to pronounce moral judgment.”

An Ivorybill in Arkansas, which human guilt has conjured up from extinction; mud daubers toting “stunned spiders” to their nests on a screened porch in Louisiana; a whale shark off the Yucatan whose spots tell its story in indecipherable Braille; conchs harvested from an undersea garden in the Caymans; stray dogs in Athens, ancient gods in disguise—the lives of these creatures and others entwine with ours in The Garden of the Fugitives.Loosely based on the story of Eve, this collection of poems takes the reader from Eden into a fallen world.  Exploring the tense relationships between women and men, mothers and daughters, and human beings and other species, these poems lead to Pompeii’s memorial to the “ash people” in The Garden of the Fugitives, where parents and children, inside their husks of plaster, never stop dying to the singing of bees.WISTERIAOozing perfume,the vine kills exquisitelyin such high style.The trees have no ideawhat’s happening to them.

The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: TennesseeBeauty Strip considers the landscapes and living things of Appalachia, protests the industrialization that leaves ruin in its wake, and celebrates the human capacity to remake, redeem, and find shelters and homes. Part sketchbook, part dreambook, Beauty Strip maps and ruminates on, haunts and is haunted by, the mountaintop removal sites and mill towns, the salt-works and bloomeries, that have scarred the land from West Virginia to Virginia to Tennessee.

This collection, Morton’s tenth, is a bold book of poetry delving into risks. It’s the moving forward; the constant discovery of new things. Using a combination of quotes, mythological images, and exquisite metaphors from nature, Morton delivers poems that describe the absolute urgency of giving one’s heart over to life, the burning drive to have faith in the world, the insistence that everything, in its own way, is holy. This book is unfettered joy.

This collection, Morton’s tenth, is a bold book of poetry delving into risks. It’s the moving forward; the constant discovery of new things. Using a combination of quotes, mythological images, and exquisite metaphors from nature, Morton delivers poems that describe the absolute urgency of giving one’s heart over to life, the burning drive to have faith in the world, the insistence that everything, in its own way, is holy. This book is unfettered joy.Tending Fires        I wanted to write a sonnet last night,because that’s what lovers do, but the fireneeded tending, and all I could think ofwere your shoulders, and that’s not romantic,so I put on another log, and thoughtabout that hot summer day underneaththat oak, when our shoulders brushed, and I blushedat the nearness of you, and how we madelove that night . . . still . . . that’s not what I wantedto write . . . But it’s you;  you, my love.  You aremy night and my morning, and the hot coalsbeneath these logs . . . hear them hiss and whisperlike cicadas—cicadas of the trees,and the summer, and of all things that burn.

Lucas has inherited his mother's bakery, as well as her obsession for baking sourdough: a bread conceived by wild strains of yeast, and ripened until its flavor becomes both pungent and startling.  Running the family business was a safe bet for Lucas, and a lucrative one at that; but when he finds that his soul has become infused with the same untamable character of the sourdough itself, he discovers that a safe bet can be the most dangerous thing a person can dare to make. “The masterful way Benjamin Ludwig establishes and stays true to an analogy ultimately sells the integrity of the idea and creates a continuing sense of surprise in a subject that has been exhaustively treated and in two characters who are less than perfect, but who somehow are remarkable in their ordinariness and the genuine passion they find for each other and in their journey of self-discovery. The truth is that I didn’t want to like this story, but Ludwig made me love it by remaining faithful to his characters and allowing them to carry the tale, while they develop and round out into credible and evocative, convincingly empathetic individuals who moved me with the genuineness of their hearts.”—Clay Reynolds Series Judge

Set in the suburbs and cities of the Midwest, Mid-South, and Texas, these stories explore the lives of characters biracial, black, white, and all sorts of in-between. The intersections and collisions of contemporary life are in full effect here, where the distinctions between fast food and fine art, noble and naked ambitions, reality and reality shows have become impossible to distinguish. Read these stories and understand why Steve Yarbrough said Williams “writes like Paul Auster if he were funnier or like Stanley Elkin might have if he’d ever been able to stop laughing.” " Tom Williams has done the near impossible in penning a book that is both undeniably entertaining and deeply thoughtful, Millhauser meets Bukowski meets Ellison." --Alan Heathcock, author of Volt “Sure, we need the nudge of category to help us all think straight, but we also need the rangy trickster, Tom Williams, to do the bang-up boundary work of imaginary anthropology in these deadpan dead-on gems. These infiltrating texts take us sideways, through and through, turn us inside-out.” . --Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Four for a Quarter  

It should come as no surprise that poets are often exceptionally fine cooks, savoring food the way they savor words and at the same time recognizing that just as a gathering of words does not necessarily mean a good poem, neither does a mixture of ingredients necessarily mean a good recipe. In Cooking with the Texas Poets Laureate, the editors, all members of Dr. Paul Ruffin’s 2014 graduate Editing/Publishing class, solicited recipes and food-related poetry and prose from Texas Poet Laureates of this millennia. The result is a most unusual gathering of personalities equally comfortable with the spatula or the pen.Eating Texas It’s taken a long apprenticeship to make waffles in the shape of Texas. First there were mountains over Waco. Then the Panhandle sank. A few more false starts when the Red River swamped Oklahoma and the Rio Grande dripped into Mexico. Now I can make perfect ones. All I have to do is take care to stop pouring the batter a little shy of El Paso, Dalhart, and Texarkana. For some reason, Brownsville needs more. Otherwise, my grandchildren complain they don’t have the tail of Texas to bite off.

The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: Louisiana Alluvial City, Louisiana, is a small fishing village in St. Bernard Parish, roughly 30 miles southeast of New Orleans. Lying between the Mississippi River and Lake Borgne's open path to the Gulf of Mexico, the land has built up through accretion and worn away through erosion, leaving remnants of its history like a genealogy. The poems in Alluvial Cities are drawn from this layered landscape's geology and history, its people and language, and the kindred ties between earth and water, flesh and blood.

The present volume draws on nine book-length collections of Thomas’s poetry, and includes a generous selection of new poems. Five of the collections are comprised of poems of geographic place, four of which are set primarily in Texas. His fifth “place” collection is set on the coast of Maine. The poems selected from his remaining collections range in subject matter from outlaw bikers to ekphrasis; from the avian world to an asylum for the criminally insane. PIANO TUNER The tools of his trade are unassuming and relatively primitive.  The stagehand is his counterpart in drama.   In the shadows of architects, for grand cathedrals of sonatas, he lays the bricks.  Of pitch and tone, he is master. Even a concert pianist steers clear of his ear.

Poems from sonnets to free verse focus on pleasures and problems in ranch life and in west Texas, which include variations differing for generations returning to the ranch, and those family members who leave the ranch for city life. CORMORANTS’ JOURNEY Snowbirds come diving down, sliding in carelessly splatting, pecking on windows, doors, building nests, dropping threads, shards of old nests hanging on their beaks, claws. Their fluttering white feathers blocking the sun’s puny attempts to break through, making the streets slick with their droppings as their baggage slides by, bumping into place side by side by side. Odysseus would tramp off to far west Texas, hankering for firm enchiladas, crusty tacos, brown eyes, and thin clear skies.

Camp Huntsville was one of the first and largest POW camps constructed in America during World War II. Located roughly eight miles east of Huntsville, Texas, in Walker County, the camp was built in 1942 and opened for prisoners the following year. The camp served as a model site for POW installations across the country and set a high standard for the treatment of prisoners.Between 1943 and 1945, the camp housed roughly 4,700 German POWs and experienced tense relations between incarcerated Nazi and anti-Nazi factions. Then, during the last months of the war, the American military selected Camp Huntsville as the home of its top-secret re-education program for Japanese POWs.The irony of teaching Japanese prisoners about democracy and voting rights was not lost on African Americans in East Texas who faced disenfranchisement and racial segregation. Nevertheless, the camp did inspire some Japanese prisoners to support democratization of their home country when they returned to Japan after the war. Meanwhile, in this country, the US government sold Camp Huntsville to Sam Houston State Teachers College in 1946, and the site served as the school's Country Campus through the mid-1950s.

Camp Huntsville was one of the first and largest POW camps constructed in America during World War II. Located roughly eight miles east of Huntsville, Texas, in Walker County, the camp was built in 1942 and opened for prisoners the following year. The camp served as a model site for POW installations across the country and set a high standard for the treatment of prisoners. Between 1943 and 1945, the camp housed roughly 4,700 German POWs and experienced tense relations between incarcerated Nazi and anti-Nazi factions. Then, during the last months of the war, the American military selected Camp Huntsville as the home of its top-secret re-education program for Japanese POWs. The irony of teaching Japanese prisoners about democracy and voting rights was not lost on African Americans in East Texas who faced disenfranchisement and racial segregation. Nevertheless, the camp did inspire some Japanese prisoners to support democratization of their home country when they returned to Japan after the war. Meanwhile, in this country, the US government sold Camp Huntsville to Sam Houston State Teachers College in 1946, and the site served as the school’s Country Campus through the mid-1950s. “This long-overdue project is one I started working on decades ago but didn’t finish. It is gratifying to see the book come to fruition through the efforts of these two history professors. And what a job they’ve done!”—Paul Ruffin, Director, TRP

Sign of Redemption tells the story of a Richie Harrison, an innocent CPA who lands behind bars in a Texas prison--the unwitting “wheelman” in an unexpected armed robbery. Harrison falls in love with Elizabeth McKenna, a lawyer there to help Harrison’s deaf friend, and thoughts of her--and the life he’s lost--begin to obsess him. He escapes, on horseback and across a raging river, and finds safety with a drug-dealing family while scheming to win his love. To woo her, Harrison drags McKenna on a destructive journey that transforms him into the criminal he never imagined he’d become. From the book: When I first got sent down, I thought about escaping every day, and every day I thought of the bullet that would pierce my back and exit through my breastbone in a bloody spray. I thought of myself tumbling out of a dead run, my legs buckling, my face hitting the pavement. Maybe I’m just a coward if all it takes to make a coward is a vivid imagination. But I wasn’t here long before I found out what it sounded like when the blood left the body in gurgling rushes.

Award winning poetry critic Ange Mlinko wrote of Parsons and his work, “The Renaissance man was once a courtly ideal; Parsons shows that it is a democratic ideal too—warm-blooded, muscular, as companionable on the page as in the flesh.” Both tangible and cerebral, Parsons’s poetry lifts its readers into a new, transformational reality with a depth of insight that is truly exceptional.Reaching For Longer Water brings the reader, the most compelling of his poems from his previous four collections, poems hailed by poetry luminaries, Edward Hirsch, Stanley Plumly, Robert Phillips, and Paul Mariani.   THE FRANK GAZE OF WOMEN After Baudelaire’s “Exotic Scent” Yes, yes, they bestow delights—        not only in the seedy way we all know: they plant something        in the littoral vacancy and in an instant there is an ineffable        fire—that forging force on which so much more depends        than wheelbarrows & chickens.

Hush Now, Baby is the story of how a little white girl climbed out of an uneasy childhood in the segregated South...on the backbone of a black woman who loved her unabashedly. A host of African-American women permeated Southern families. One of those stalwart women was Eva Aiken, a central figure in the author's life from her birth...until Eva staged a sit-in at the girl's wedding.The story captures the glorious early years of the Lowcountry South Carolina family then graphically depicts its unraveling. Eva holds them together. The family and the country's parallel struggles converge. The author lives in bubble-wrap until Civil Rights issues escalate. This story is told without pathos and with graceful restraint - the Southern way.

Hush Now, Baby is the story of how a little white girl climbed out of an uneasy childhood in the segregated South…on the backbone of a black woman who loved her unabashedly. A host of African-American women permeated Southern families. One of those stalwart women was Eva Aiken, a central figure in the author’s life from her birth…until Eva staged a sit-in at the girl’s wedding. The story captures the glorious early years of the Lowcountry South Carolina family then graphically depicts its unraveling. Eva holds them together. The family and the country’s parallel struggles converge. The author lives in bubble-wrap until Civil Rights issues escalate. This story is told without pathos and with graceful restraint—the Southern way. “Angela’s prose plunges us back in time when a generation of white children were raised by the calloused hands of slaves who, despite being freed by Lincoln, remained chained to a stubborn way of life. Instead of killing us in our sleep, they became our guardian angels, for reasons still mysteriously misunderstood.” --Ken Burger, author of Swallow Savannah, Sister Santee, Salkehatchie Soup, and Baptized in Sweet Tea.

“Drew may have lived many years among the Yanks, but his Mississippi roots are having their say, shining through in every irreverent/reverent syllable. Once you pick this book up, you won’t be putting it down any time soon!”—Nancy White THE DOWN AND DIRTY REDNECK HUNGERS FOR THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY I’ve always been afraid of burning to death, but with you I was like a tree in October, on fire with a shitload of leaves just before the north wind ripped them loose and sent them ass over teacup earthward. Girl, if only you would come again driving down Main Street, your long golden hair streaming out the window like yellow flames, your white Mustang unstained as you was, I wouldn’t give a damn about how I go, only that the crash when it comes rivals them leaves up to their stems in duff, and that one day we can look back and say okay, we crashed, but we crashed still burning.

Ne'er-do-well immigration attorney Harrison Bent can't imagine why the wealthy and mysterious Maggie Leudecke wants him to solve her eminent domain problem. If he didn't have an angry wife to placate, an inscrutable stalker to identify, an obsessed girlfriend to escape, and a murder to solve, a successful outcome to the Leudecke case might revive his career, pay for his autistic son's special school, and - most important of all - help convince his young paralegal, Chloe, that the afternoon she spent with him in a cheap motel wasn't an error in judgment, but the beginning of something profound.  If only he had some clue as to what he was doing . . . . From the book: “I know myself. That's the good news. That's also the bad news. For example, I knew I was not equipped to deal with the Leudecke case. I also knew I wouldn't turn it down or hand it off to somebody better suited. But, seriously, what background did I have in eminent domain? Or with Mexican drug dealers? Or dead Mexican drug dealers? None. And I knew it”.

Ne’er-do-well immigration attorney Harrison Bent can’t imagine why the wealthy and mysterious Maggie Leudecke wants him to solve her eminent domain problem.  If he didn’t have an angry wife to placate, an inscrutable stalker to identify, an obsessed girlfriend to escape, and a murder to solve, a successful outcome to the Leudecke case might revive his career, pay for his autistic son’s special school, and—most important of all—help convince his young paralegal, Chloe, that the afternoon she spent with him in a cheap motel wasn’t an error in judgment, but the beginning of something profound.  If only he had some clue as to what he was doing . . . .   From the book: I know myself. That’s the good news. That’s also the bad news. For example, I knew I was not equipped to deal with the Leudecke case. I also knew I wouldn’t turn it down or hand it off to somebody better suited. But, seriously, what background did I have in eminent domain?  Or with Mexican drug dealers?  Or dead Mexican drug dealers?  None. And I knew it.

When Monique LeBlanc disappears from Nova Scotia, her cousin Michelle is panic-stricken. Their summer vacation has taken an ominous turn, and a search begins. At the site of Monique''s disappearance in Grand-Pre Historic Park, police find a picture of her mother, Catherine, who passed away years ago, near Evangeline''s statue.Michelle knows that Monique is visiting the park to honor the dream she shared with her mother of visiting their Canadian homeland. What she doesn''t know is that Monique has gone back in time to her ancestors'' exile, actually living through the horrific deportation of thousands of Acadians to Louisiana in 1755.

After thirty-six years as book-editor in New York, Robin retires and moves back to her girlhood home in Oberlin, Ohio. She takes with her copies of items she had kept in a special file. The items had come not from literary agents but directly from writers, reflecting their quirky, original, creative, passionate, ironic, even bizarre voices. All the items enlighten and entertain.   A Hall of Fame for Unknown Writers is Robin’s story as she reproduces the comic items and nominates them for induction into America’s first (and only) hall of fame for unknown writers, where the motto reads: “We’re in Kansas forevermore.” “For thirty-six years, I was an editor at a family-owned (now part of a bulky conglomerate) book-publishing house in New York. In retirement, I thought it might be enjoyable to write not the Great American Novel (my authors are trying to do that) but the Fun American Novel. Over the years, I had accumulated all sorts of material that I could weave into the novel: material that came to me directly from the country’s most unforgettable unknown writers and professors.” –Robin

Set in the drought-plagued landscape of Central Texas, Ascension is a collection of lyric poems that chronicles life in and around Llano, Texas (population 3,033).  Brownlee’s poems meditate on the inescapability of place. Organ Solo with Oblivion and Gar Skittish fish lay eggs   in this shallow stone    cleft of an algae chorus.       Turn my soul into song,       if you can, River Lord.          Treat believing the same         as each minnow slipping                      coin-like into deep murk.           Your spirit mimics me                     unblinking, fishbone           face framing brackish          absence, saying, Kneel         into this.  Lean low,        sinner, & drink. Bitter       infidel, swallow the black      granite whole if you are not     afraid of what comes after it:    ___________. Live forever.

William Virgil Davis is a widely published, award-winning poet. Among his many honors, fellowships, and awards are the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, the New Criterion Poetry Prize, and the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Poetry. His poems regularly appear in leading journals, both in this country and abroad. His Dismantlements of Silence: Poems Selected and New brings together a generous selection of Davis’s poetry to date. It includes samples of his early uncollected work, poems from his previously published books, and selections from his most recently published work.   Driving Alone in Winter Driving alone in winter through acres of land deserted by everything save the snow trapped in the ruts of the road, the moon broken by the bare trees, I remember the days when my brothers and I would fall asleep in the backseat on the way home. Tonight, coming home, I remember the faint light on the dashboard holding my father’s face, my mother’s soft voice, my brothers asleep, the moon running among the trees beside the car.

Winner, 2014 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize California Book Awards silver medal for fiction, 2016

It’s 1981, and thirteen-year-old Roscoe McAdams and his brother and sister have always lived with their parents, Sebastian and Moonstar, in an isolated cabin high on a ridge in California’s northern Sierra, though often in spring when Moonstar can’t stand the snow anymore she takes them for a stay down below. They’ve mostly been home-schooled. Then, through a fluke that April, Moonstar becomes a substitute teacher in a small town and enrolls the kids in school there. Roscoe assumes that when summer comes, they’ll go back to the ridge and Sebastian: that’s how it’s always been. But they don’t, and then everything Roscoe thinks he knows for sure begins to fall apart.