From the editors of the innovative composite anthology A Shared Voice (INDIEFAB and Spur Award Finalist, 2013) comes this unique anthology of works by Southern poets. The poems in this exciting volume crisscross the Greater American South from Virginia to the Ozarks, from the Texas hill country to the Florida coast. Writing in a variety of forms and on an amazing array of subjects, the fifty master-poets in Southern Voices explore all the corners of this gradually evolving region along with its flora, fauna, cultural idiosyncrasies, and distinctive cuisines. Contributors include:

Gilbert Allen

Marcus Amaker

Alan Berecka

Libby Bernardin

Alan Birkelbach

Cathy Smith Bowers

Jerry Bradley

Joey Brown

Jerry Craven

Sherry Craven

Travis Denton

Gavin Geoffrey Dillard

George Drew

Denise Duhamel

Kendall Dunkelberg

Jo Angela Edwins

Beth Ann Fennelly

Lyman Grant

Ken Hada

Terrance Hayes

Silas House

Ellen E. Hyatt

Luisa A. Igloria

Ashley M. Jones

John Lane

Ed Madden

Campbell McGrath

Jim Minick

Robert Morgan

karla k. morton

Rick Mulkey

Jim Murphy

Brady Peterson

Catherine Pierce

Lynn Powell

Octavio Quintanilla

Ron Rash

Chelsea Rathburn

Glenis Redmond

Suzanne Underwood Rhodes

Mona Lisa Saloy

Jan Seale

Roy Seeger

Martha Serpas

John Warner Smith

Ron Smith

Larry D. Thomas

Amanda Rachelle Warren

Marjory Wentworth

Edward Wilson

What is the cost of our unchosen obligations? What is the cost of love? How do we pay, and where are the receipts kept? These are poems about love, fear, and hope. These are poems about fatherhood and about the things we bring to it from our own childhood. These poems explore how the past continues to live alongside and inside the present and what that means for who we are and who we will someday be.

This is a book written for university political science classes. It focuses on the Texas constitution, its history, and how it functions in Texas politics. It discusses the constitution's context in American federalism and the role of elections, political parties, and interest groups in the state and gives much attention to the three branches of Texas government created by the Texas Constitution of 1876. The book provides foundations for understanding the current Texas Constitution and some of the unique features of Texas government. Historically, the Constitution was written in response to the state's experience with Reconstruction and the governorship of Edmund Davis, and a political culture that embraced and continues to embrace rugged individualism and a strong belief in limited government. Today, the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of Texas government retain the basic structures created for them by the Constitution of 1876, as well as additional features added through constitutional amendments and state statutes.

The Meditating Mother is a debut collection of short fiction by Laura Kopchick that explores the magic of everyday existence. There's a mother in the NICU who seems to have healing powers, if only she could use them on her own ailing son. A next door neighbor has a strange ability to stir up new feelings. A curious married couple holds a secret about which the neighborhood kids wonder. In each of Kopchick's stories, the characters feel alive, real, and full. They remind us how extraordinary ordinary life today can be.

The Senior Class: 100 Poets on Aging assembles a beautiful chorus of distinct and accessible voices describing in a variety of poetic forms what it means to be a member of our aging society in America today. You will find poems on a wide range of familiar senior topics, including changing dynamics in family relationships and marriage, mortality, grief, eldercare, retirement, gratitude, earned wisdom, senior living, physical and mental decline, and spiritual reflection.

Turtle on a Post is a collection of memoirs that tells the story of the life and legacy of Senator Carl Parker as told to Jim Sanderson. Parker was a Texas State Senator and served in the House of Representatives. His long career in politics lasted from 1962 to 1995. In these pages, you will get a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the interworking of the Texas political machine. You'll also get to know the man behind the legend-a father, husband, and world traveler who lived a full and fascinating life. This book is perfect for history buffs, political aficionados, and those who just want to read a well-told tale.

In Elisa A. Garza's debut poetry collection, Regalos, we find a Chicana feminist voice filled with power, grace, and truth. Here poetry delves deep into family issues, cultura, and language. Garza has created a masterpiece that will inspire and move readers from all backgrounds.

This is the first major international anthology of contemporary

surrealist and magical realist poetry. It presents poems by

130 poets from 25 countries, who explore the boundaries of

the poetic imagination, presenting the world as a vigorous

unbound frame. These brilliantly original poems layer

contradictory conditions of fantasy and reality into new

contours of existence, transforming them into what is

possible. These pages offer new perspectives on what it

means to be alive, to be fully human in a world of new

possibilities.

A volume of poetry and prose affirming the certitude of aging. In these pages are both the carefree stance of the long-lived and the serious business of broken bones. Seale's poems spell out the patronizing of seasoned flesh, the nobility of canes, the zen of jigsaw puzzles. Essay-ettes comment on writing utensils, deciduous leaves, chronometry, and self-talk. Humor and soulfulness extend to the reader, as well as the inevitability of time and thus the urgency for truthfulness and pleasure.

Many folks think of the middle of the country as flyover country. Level Land: Poetry for and About the I35 Corridor, dispels this myth. Included in this expansive anthology are poems from authors of diverse backgrounds from the southern border of Laredo, Texas up to the Canadian border in Minnesota. You will read poems from folks from all walks of life from college professors to community performers, in a variety of languages, including English, Spanish, and indigenous languages such as Kiowa, about a variety of subjects, all inspired by the cultural and geographic landscape of this unique region of America. Level Land re-defines flyover country, instead, as a creative corridor filled with the vibrancy of life.

Lisa Adam has done a miraculous thing: taken the whispered and fragmented words of the ancient Coahuiltecan peoples of south Texas and northern Mexico and expanded their meanings into poems that make our hearts beat fast as we connect with these ancients. With impeccable research, Adam transports us to the age of conquest in the Southwest by the Spanish crown, a time when the nomadic indigenous peoples were drawn into the great missions scattered along the Rio Grande and northward. Her interpretations of the puzzling ideologies, clashes, crucial misunderstandings, and clear cultural distinctions between civilizations brought about by the discovery of the New World opens the curtain on our under-standing of this seminal time. In our present age of reinterpreting what it means to be world citizens, we find in this beautiful book that the struggle to be accepted and yet to hold on to what is dear is an old instructive story, ever challenging us to re-think who we are and what we will accept in the pluralism of our societies.

In this volume, Jan Seale contemplates small things. Think peppercorns, straight pins, freckles. Think fingernails, commas, stamps. These objects

have their own raison d����etre. Here are the small sublime, the Lilliputian laughable, the diminutive dear. Relish their existence. Their essence and

standing may be important beyond our or their knowing.

Jan Seale's journey in language has produced here a miscellany of observations, how-to's, examples, and anecdotes by one who has spent six decades writing and teaching the art of writing. From Frightening Words to Five Versions of a Poem from Babysitting the Imagination to Porch Light Titles, this collection offers practical words to the novice writer as well as a touchstone of reflection to the experienced one.

This vital collection of poetry and prose provides us with Another Way of seeing Southeast Texas-through the eyes of its youth. These voices are ones of survival, resilience, and hope in the face of some of the worst natural disasters in the nation's history. Read heartfelt, first-hand accounts of a surviving Hurricane Harvey, living on the front lines of climate change, and enduring systemic inequality. There has to be another way, poet Sakara Harris writes in the titular poem, and indeed, these young authors can lead us there with the power of their words.

Beyond the Fields is a story about a path from wheat fields to baseball fields to a philosophical life fascinated by a relatively new, non-traditional field of inquiry: philosophy of sport. The book moves from dirt and land and playworlds to a world dominated by ideas and arguments.

David Meischen conjures the hackberries and mesquite, the cotton harvests and rainless earth of his rural Texas homeplace with meticulous reserve, clarity, and crisp music. A work of abiding love and questing memory, this new volume provides the stirring pleasures of a family album while nimbly skirting sentimentality and reflexive nostalgia in favor of well-earned insight, jubilant celebration (mornings aglow like carnival glass), and able compassion. The highest compliment that I can pay Meischen is that his German-American family chronicle brings to mind James Agee's indelible and legendary Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Caliche Road Poems is a vibrant contribution to the literature of Texas.

Cyrus Cassells, Texas Poet Laureate, 2021, author of Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch?

There is a boy in these poems, and there is an adult looking back at the boy, and the boy and the adult are one and the same: I forget he's there // the nine-year old inside me / clamoring to get out, David Meischen writes. There is a mother by a clothesline and a father striking matches to keep the cold at bay. There is butchering and there is drought, and there is hard work, and there is heartbreak. In these poems, yearning is shaped like the shadow of the South Texas agarita, shaped like a rooster, a gutted lamb. In these poems, lyricism binds the living and the dead, and in each one, Meischen sings to the past, and in each one, his voice grows and glows in the dark like a caliche road in moonlight.

Octavio Quintanilla, author of the poetry collections, If I Go Missing and The Book of Wounded Sparrows

The poet asks a cousin, four decades gone, Is there an after, Gary? He answers in the pages of this collection inhabited by ghosts and memories that could only be conjured by a son rooted in caliche hardpan and reared by calloused hands that fingered rosary beads and coaxed cotton and sorghum from land better suited to huisache and prickly pear. There is an after. No map can take you there, but David Meischen knows the way. And how lucky are we to journey with him, dusting off gravestones, taking in the gray light of a screened-in porch, touching bare feet to creaking floorboards. You'll want to travel this road again and again.

Michelle Otero, Albuquerque Poet Laureate, 2018-20, author of Vessels

In the note at the beginning of this stunning collection of poetry, Meischen writes, These poems originate from a particular place and time-the Meischen family farm in the Dilworth community of Jim Wells County Texas, 1948 and the years that followed. Demonstrating his mastery of a number of challenging poetic forms, the poet probes, with striking detail and haunting emotional ambience, the South Texas farm life of his upbringing. The place, however, which Meischen so vividly and poignantly captures in this remarkable collection is twofold: first, the particular flora, fauna, significant others, and unforgiving hardships of life on the Meischen family farm; secondly, and most importantly, the universal, endless pastures of the human heart.

Larry D. Thomas, Texas Poet Laureate, 2008, author of As If Light Actually Matters: New & Selected Poems