Bøger udgivet af Lamar University Press

Wendy Dunmeyer's My Grandmother's Last Letter is as fine-tuned as a debut collection of poetry can be. Expressive and descriptive, all of these poems offer the kind of intimate viewpoints-of their speakers' days, homes, families, hopes, and hurts-that I most prize as a reader of poetry. I am struck by the way motherhood is shown at both its softest and hardest edges, by the way the women's lives are treated so elegantly, by the strength of voice. The narrative lines that run throughout Letter are captivating.-Joey Brown, author of Oklahomaography and The Feral Love PoemsLyrical, lushly imagined, and occasionally harrowing, My Grandmother's Last Letter confronts sorrow with aesthetic discipline and opposes cruelty with a fierce faith. Dunmeyer is adept at the sonnet and other forms, and, in this book haunted by family history, her formal sureness and control ride atop a swell of powerful feeling. -Benjamin Myers, former Oklahoma Poet Laureate and author of The Family Book of MartyrsFormally diverse and painstaking crafted, the poems of Wendy Dunmeyer's My Grandmother's Last Letter dazzle. The collection celebrates the author's maternal grandmother, an Australian war bride whose faith in God provided respite for her lonely life. Other poems celebrate the prairie, reveal the author's inventive humor, and explore loneliness enriched by faith and family legacy. A recently deceased mentor inspired the author's successful search for the elegant word.-Dr. John Morris, Professor of English at Cameron University

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

A poetry collection that explores travel, migration, and fatherhood in contemporary America. The poet, Nathanael O'Reilly, offers a unique perspective on the world today as an Australian immigrant living in Texas, an English professor, and a world traveler. These moving poems are both accessible and finely crafted works of art.

Bargen takes readers along on his personal journey facing a cancer diagnosis and treatment. He writes of the mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical demands he endures. His poetry is honest and raw, but still poignantly beautiful, in spite of the subject matter. In Radiation Diary, Walter Bargen considers cancer: not just the revolt of the body against the body, but the many ways a difficult diagnosis undoes, then alters, then describes the victim. How, these poems ask, does one achieve balance or purpose as the body seems to proceed toward its own demise? What do balance and purpose mean under these pressures? And what of poetry and of the memories that create poems? I've been a major fan of Bargen's poetry for nearly three decades now. In this, his twenty-sixth book, he is in peak form, writing with fearlessness, humanity, and brilliance about the poet's own body, "a navigation chart folded / too many times to find a way out." --Kevin Prufer

These tales will take you into the lives of characters you will long remember: -a peasant boy in war-torn Sui China survives a perilous journey and finds his vocation as a poet -an American novelist is invited to the European city he has never visited but in which he sets all his books. -a coed seduces the conductor of a German orchestra then is trapped with both in the middle of a Middle Eastern war. -an elderly Frenchwoman is interviewed about her time as a model for two famous modernists In the title story, dream and memory unveil the profound tale of a persecuted Chinese artist and his Americanized daughter.

The writing in this remarkable collection makes such masterful use of bones as metaphor that the book reads as much like a single long poem as it does a bringing together of individual lyrics. Open the book anywhere and enjoy a small gem of poetry, or read the whole book-even in a single sitting-and enjoy a moving and brilliant long poem.

Charles Behlen's poems in 'Failing Heaven'-whether the setting is a peepshow booth in Hobbs, New Mexico, a death row cell in Huntsville, a food bank in Dumas, or a street corner in San Antonio-affirm that our suffering sanctifies the profane.

Stop and stay a while in this tiny town located just east of Fargo. Meet the narrator, his overbearing girlfriend and meddling mother, and the other colorful characters who reside there. Travel the pages to see the stark beauty of the prairie in winter, feel the pain of marrying the wrong person, taste the recipes in the church cookbook, and feel the fabric of the fields and faces along the way. You'll be surprised how much there is to see.

Levels of Incompetence is a rollicking reminiscence through eight decades of a life well-spent. Bob Davis is a skilled raconteur whose tales are spiced by the remembered pleasures of academic life, peripatetic travels, and endearing family profiles, and his wit and lively style are on full display.

J.W. Ragsdale, a failed Mississippi cotton farmer turned Memphis homicide detective, along with his partner, Tyrone Walker is faced with a cowboy preacher, a home invasion, urban gangs, and a killer who sees spirits and converses with the dead. The setting is Memphis, a city haunted by the blues, rock and roll, magic, humor, and violence. J.W. and Tyrone must sort through another spell of mania on the Big River, and bring things back to a low rumble in a town where tough mojo hands, death, and high hilarity come together.

Lynn Hoggard's poems and stories richly evoke mid-20th-century south Louisiana-a soft, rural, small-town world not so far away in years, yet lost now in the dust of galloping development. Motherland is a hymn to that region's sweet, watery earth, its people and customs, and the author's deep, vivid memories. This book is a treasure.

Writing Texas is an anthology of some of the best current fiction, poetry, and nonfiction by Texas professors of creative writing and their top students.

This collection brings together poems that reflect Glen Sorestad's fascination with and affection for the American Southwest's distinctive landscape and the people who inhabit it. From his first visit over 30 years ago, Sorestad has been recording in poetry his experiences, stories he hears, and his unique observations. The result is a gathering of insightful and entertaining poems spanning several decades and countless miles of traveling Southwestern highways and backroads. Glen Sorestad, first poet laureate of Saskatchewan, has published more than twenty books of poems. His poetry has been translated into seven languages and appeared in dozens of anthologies and textbooks.

In this, her second full collection of poems, Michelle Hartman continues the breathtakingly honest, articulate, insightful, bawdy, hilarious, revelatory, and incomparably zany diatribe which she so poignantly launched with Disenchanted and Disgruntled. Nothing escapes her incisive, ironic eye, not even her own hallowed art of poetry. No other poet would even attempt to blend such unlikely elements as mistresses, Robert Hass, social injustice, Pavlov, adultery, Ted Cruz, inbreeding, Buddha, feminism, John Donne, legal chicanery, W. S. Merwin, Chupacabra, and countless additional and disparate ingredients into a "poetic stew" so gourmet and delectable.

The poems in 'With Our Baggage' remind us of the baggage we all carry and show us how to do it with grace. The range of subjects is vast, from baseball heroes to the failures of fathers, from being a poet to being Polish in South Texas, from God's radio to American machismo. But the real subject here is the human animal in its many glorious strivings and bumbling failures. The result is a vision of the world as a strange, funny, beautiful place. Though Berecka's poems are sometimes hilarious, tongue-in-cheek, and satiric, they are also painful, poignant, and bittersweet. These varied poems offer the reader a touching human response to incursions of the holy into everyday life.

In pre-Colombian Mexico, song and dance were vital components of daily life. However, all that is left of this vast tradition of lyrical verse are fewer than 200 poems, most contained in three codices written just after the Spanish conquest. In this new translation, David Bowles employs the tools of English verse to craft accessible, powerful versions of selected songs from the Aztec and Mayan civilizations, striking a balance between the features of the original performance and the expectations of modern readers of poetry. With full-color illustrations, a thorough glossary and insightful introduction, 'Flower, Song, Dance' brings a neglected literary tradition to life for the 21st-century.

'A Shared Voice' is a conversation in narrative by twenty-four of the finest fiction writers in America. A total of twenty-four tales, each linked to another by at least one literary element such as character or setting or theme, make up this first-of-its-kind anthology by writers from Texas and the Carolinas. The individual short stories in 'A Shared Voice' include twelve anchor tales-six by writers from Texas and six by writers from the Carolinas-and twelve original works of fiction written in response to the anchor narratives. The result is a rich and varicolored tapestry of narrative voices by writers who have spent their lives weaving tales.

Melvin Sterne's stories are remarkable in the range and depth of the settings, the characters, and the universal longings that roil within them. They command a reader in the way fine writing sometimes can, from a sensibility that has experienced widely and knows much. 'The Number You Have Reached' is a splendid collection from a brilliant new voice.

These are quiet, intimate, witty conversational poems addressing how the human heart forgets itself under personal injury and the stinging justice of misery, and then, in the poignancy of remembering itself, is reborn again, unyielding, ready for "another waltz at the window, one more dance." If pain is "unresurrected" truth, then healing is "coming back to familiar spots to remember" a world we forgot existed or that we never even expected. Read this book and let your heart be healed.

Dr. Jean Andrews' story of Leroy Colombo is an engrossing biographical tale about a deaf man succeeding during an era when disabled people were largely shunned. Colombo chose a life that allowed him to excel in saving lives as a lifeguard and winning swimming contests. Andrews deftly sets up scenarios that explain why Colombo's remarkable feats resulted in his being beloved and never ignored in the beach community of Galveston, Texas during his lifetime. This is a good read.

In A Garden on the Brazos Dominique Inge shares her considerable gardening expertise in a series of astute observations about the joys and trials of Texas gardening. The book contains both carefully researched scientific information and insightful musings in prose so well wrought and charming that you will read for the pleasure of reading as well as for the book's practical guidance in gardening.

In Underground Musicans Carol Coffee Reposa presents a delicious double metaphor of geography and color. In her itinerary she leads us first to Mexico and Ecuador, then to Western Europe, to Russia, then back home. In this collection, so much depends upon images-the pulse of guitars and trumpets in Veracruz, the Nazca lines spiraling across the horizon, the picture of Lucifer's face turned away as God hurls him from the heavens and scores of other images that, in Carol's talented hands, carry literal and metaphoric meanings. With this book Carol Coffee Reposa establishes herself as one of the most insightful of Texas poets.

These are poems that lovers of poetry will much admire, fans of stories will enjoy, and poets will find astonishing for the poetic mastery in the integration of form and meaning. Katherine Hoerth is a lyric poet of anecdotes and stories. Rather than tell a story her poems immerse readers in it with images speaking to all five senses. Open the book to any page and you will find the richness of her imagery. Here are samples from 5 random pages: the reader can experience the taste of pomegranate, smell the odor of spritzed perfume, feel the sunbaked warmth of a rock, and hear a birdsong. Often Hoerth's images become more vivid for their mixing, for their surprising synesthesia. Adding to the lyrical effect of the masterful use of imagery are the sounds. Most lines are blank verse, a subtle, musical form that in Hoerth's hands enhances the words rather than intruding upon them. In these pages the poet loans us her remarkable sensibilities so we can experience her world, and if we are wise, we can apply her sensual wisdom to new examinations of our own lives.

Janet McCann uses her gift of lyrical language to share her visions and her many loves-of people, great literature, the taste of fine food, art, cats-all the while reminding us of mutability, of time-wrought change, of the inevitability of growing old. All stories progress, she reminds us, however much we might want to end them with happily ever after. McCann invites us to look at "Old Cinderella" who advises her granddaughter to "marry a carpenter" while her own arthritic fingers fasten the diamond tiara (That glass slipper in a case, backlit) Prince long gone in a drunken duel Over someone's daughter Never wanted another, took up sewing But now can't make the tiny stitches . . . There is also renewal and joy in the movement of time that McCann celebrates in well-wrought lines leading the reader to share epiphanies, as when the grandmother guides grandson to the telescope, shows him how to use it. He catches his breath at the curve, the long unscrolling of heaven. This is a book you will return to often to experience and to ponder its poetic and solemn beauty.

From life along the South Texas border to travels abroad to the vitality of family bonds, Waiting for an Etcher provides a series of memorable images and insights. Chip Dameron's eye for detail and gift of phrasing offer readers the opportunity to enter the world of each poem and experience its landscape.

In this series of linked short stories you will meet folk who inhabit the stark and wild countryside of West Texas, terrain that helps define them as well as the values that elicit many to behave in ways that will startle you. Here are only a few of the characters you will have the privilege of meeting: Otto, a boy who struggles with the slippery nature of words, is captured and tortured by Comanche raiders. Riding with the Comanches is Thomas Jefferson, a black man tries to help Otto. Deputy Sheriff Justan Brady tries in his inept way "to fix Danny Fowler's killing." Dee Price would willingly show you her knife scars as well as her mastectomy scars yet she is still capable of surprising you with her solution to the murder of Danny Fowler. Like many other characters in Trashy Behavior, you will meet Dee Price in more than one story. A young Gregory drives to a ranch to deliver a car to his boss's wife who tries to seduce him, then as he leaves, he runs into two men who blast his car with sawed-off shotguns. There are many other vividly-presented West Texans in the pages of this collection of stories, ones you will remember long after reading the book. While these are linked stories, you can read them in any order, and all of the tales will grab your attention and keep you turning pages. "Bankers"-the story featuring Gregory and his trouble delivering his boss's car-won Kay Cattrulla Award for Short Fiction presented by the Texas Institute of Letters for the best story by a Texan in 2012.

Parkinson's disease and poetry square off in this volume written from the perspectives of a caregiver and her husband. With grit, humor, and compassion, Jan Seale spells out the vicissitudes of dealing with this so-far incurable neurological condition affecting seven million people worldwide. From onset through progression and treatment to final simple toleration, the poems testify to the mysteries and vagaries of the disease. Seeing faces in everything, lacking the ability to smile, stalling in doorways, obsessing on creativity-these and other peculiar symptoms of the brain syndrome are explored in accessible poetry from the desk of a Texas poet laureate.

The stories in Wegner's 'Love is Not a Dirty Word' drive home just how human humans are. The characters often exhibit weakness, misperception, lack of self-knowledge, and even, at times, meanness, but in the end they are always, without a doubt, completely and totally human, with fundamental human characteristics that redeem them. They are for the most part blue collar, kids and teens and adults not at the bottom, but certainly in the bottom half, of our culture's socioeconomic structure, but their struggles drive home the undeniable fact that ultimately we're all the same in our conflicts, our uncertainty, our mistakes, and our abiding love of other humans.

This is a unique anthology of epistolary poetry-poems in the form of letters. The book consists of new work by more than fifty poets from the United States, Canada, Europe, and Israel. Poetry in this collection, most written for this specific anthology, continues a tradition more than two thousand years old in the combining of letter-writing with poetry. The poets published here explore concerns that so many personal letters often express: love and loss, hope and redemption, turmoil and joy, outward exploration and introspection. The poems amount to literary envelopes that readers can open to discover lyrical language offered in the form of epistles.