Ghost Fishing is the first anthology to focus solely on poetry with an eco-justice bent. A culturally diverse collection entering a field where nature poetry anthologies have historically lacked diversity, this book presents a rich terrain of contemporary environmental poetry with roots in many cultural traditions. Eco-justice poetry is poetry born of deep cultural attachment to the land and poetry born of crisis. Aligned with environmental justice activism and thought, eco-justice poetry defines environment as “the place we work, live, play, and worship.” This is a shift from romantic notions of nature as a pristine wilderness outside ourselves toward recognition of the environment as home: a source of life, health, and livelihood.
This collection of poems begins rooted in the landscape of the U.S. South as it voices singular lives carved out of immediate and historical trauma. While these poems dwell in the body, often meditating on its frailty and desire, they also question the weight that literary, historical, and religious icons are expected to bear.
The Broken Country uses a violent incident that took place in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2012 as a springboard for examining the long-term cultural and psychological effects of the Vietnam War. To make sense of the shocking and baffling incident—in which a young homeless man born in Vietnam stabbed a number of white men purportedly in retribution for the war—Paisley Rekdal draws on a remarkable range of material and fashions it into a compelling account of the dislocations suffered by the Vietnamese and also by American-born veterans over the past decades.
Where the New World Is assesses how fiction published since 1980 has resituated the U.S. South globally and how earlier twentieth-century writing already had done so in ways traditional southern literary studies tended to ignore. Martyn Bone argues that this body of fiction has, over the course of some eighty years, challenged received readings and understandings of the U.S. South as a fixed place largely untouched by immigration (or even internal migration) and economic globalization.
In this collection of short essays, Brian Doyle presents a compelling account of a life lived playing, watching, loving, and coaching basketball. He recounts his passion for the gyms, the playgrounds, the sounds and scents, the camaraderie, the fierce competition, the anticipation and exhaustion, and even some of the injuries.
Thaw delves into the issues at the core of a resilient family: kinship, poverty, violence, death, abuse, and grief. The poems follow the speaker, as both mother and daughter, as she travels through harsh and beautiful landscapes in Canada, Sweden, and the United States. Moving through these places, she examines how her surroundings affect her inner landscape; the natural world becomes both a place of refuge and a threat. As these themes unfold, the histories and cold truths of her family and country intertwine and impinge on her, even as she tries to outrun them.
Diagrams were an important part of Dustin Parsons’s childhood. Parsons’s father was an oilfield mechanic, and in his spare time he was also a woodworker, an automotive mechanic, a welder, and an artist. His shop had countless manuals with “exploded view” parts directories that the young Parsons flipped through constantly. Whether rebuilding a transmission, putting together a diesel engine, or assembling a baby cradle, his father had a visual guide to help him. In these essays, Parsons uses the same approach to understanding his father as he navigates the world of raising two young biracial boys.
The eleven beautifully crafted stories in Bad Kansas reveal the complicated underbelly of the country’s most flown-over state and the quirky characters that call it home. In this darkly humorous collection, Kansas becomes a state of mind as Mandelbaum’s characters struggle to define their relationship to home and what it means to stay or leave, to hold on or let go.
This collection of more than twenty-five essays, both meditative and formally inventive, considers all kinds of subjects: everyday objects such as keys and hats, plus concepts of time and place; the memoir; writing; the essay itself; and Michael Martone’s friendship with the writers David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Kurt Vonnegut. Throughout the essays, Martone’s style expands with the incorporation of new technological platforms.
This collection of lyric poems wrestles with a sense of self that has become fragmented by the experience of war. Christopher P. Collins has taken his tours in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, extracted their emotional shrapnel, and examined their toll on his civilian life. He considers the two sides of himself that have been wrought in these parallel lives. One is the self of the citizen-soldier, and the other is the self of the husband and father. His poems reveal the brutal ways in which these selves collide and bleed into one another.
The South’s relationship with drinking is complicated. Although religious and legal mandates discourage the sale and consumption of alcohol, the region has a robust drinking culture. As the home of NASCAR, a sport that arose from the high-speed antics of bootleggers, and Tennessee Williams, a man notorious for both his literary genius and his propensity to imbibe, the Bible Belt has a booze-soaked background. In the recipes and essays in The Southern Foodways Alliance Guide to Cocktails, Jerry Slater and Sara Camp Milam and their cocktail cabinet of contributors bridge the gaps between the culture, history, and practice of drinking in the South.
Did you know that January is creativity month? The UGA Press publishes dozens of books a year which all require creativity to make, but some of our books are unique in the way they demonstrate—and get to the heart of—the creative impulse. So as January comes to an end, check out a few recent books from the Press that really exemplify creativity.
Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology edited by Melissa Tuckey: A gathering of poetry at the intersection of culture, social justice, and the environment (Coming in April)
Begin with a Failed Body poems by Natalie J. Graham and selected by Kwame Dawes: Poems that consider the body as a site for revelation
The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam by Paisley Rekdal and selected by Michael Steinberg: An exploration of the enduring ramifications of the Vietnam War
Where the New World Is: Literature about the U.S. South at Global Scales by Martyn Bone: How the humanities can help us understand globalization and immigration—the paramount realities in the twenty-first-century U.S. South
Hoop: A Basketball Life in Ninety-Five Essays by Brian Doyle: Essays celebrating the wit, creativity, and magic of the sport of basketball
Thaw poems by Chelsea Dingman and selected by Allison Joseph: A debut collection of gritty yet poignant poems
Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams by Dustin Parsons: A novel view of fathers and the gadgets that make up childhood (Coming in March)
Bad Kansas stories by Becky Mandelbaum: A collection of stories based on the lives of tenacious and original characters
Brooding: Arias, Choruses, Lullabies, Follies, Dirges, and a Duet by Michael Martone: An inventive collection of essays that speak from many platforms (Coming in March)
My American Night poems by Christopher P. Collins and selected by David Bottoms: Brutal yet reflective poems that come to grips with the horrors of war (Coming in February)
The Southern Foodways Alliance Guide to Cocktails by Sara Camp Milam and Jerry Slater, photographs by Andrew Thomas Lee: A fun and fabulous SFA cocktail recipe book for the love of entertaining
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