Since 1964, when Louisiana State University Press published its inaugural book of verse (Miller Williams’s A Circle of Stone), its poetry list has grown exponentially—191 books by 93 poets—into a program that inspires understandable pride in those associated with it. Two collections have won the Pulitzer Prize—The Flying Change (1986), by Henry Taylor, and Alive Together (1996), by Lisel Mueller. Another book by Mueller, The Need to Hold Still (1980), won the National Book Award, while several other LSU titles have been finalists for that distinction, most recently The Fields of Praise (1997), by Marilyn Nelson, and The Vigil (1993), by Margaret Gibson. Dozens more have been recognized for their excellence through a host of various honors. The Press publishes the winner of the annual Walt Whitman Award, given by The Academy of American Poets for a first collection; and in 1996 it launched the Southern Messenger series in collaboration with Dave Smith, bringing two shining works into the fold each year. The appearance of The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren in 1998 meant for the Press the realization of a long, dearly held dream. To mark this thirty-five-year-old tradition as the century and millennium turn, and to offer a sampling of its richness, The Yellow Shoe Poets, a retrospective anthology, was compiled under the editorship of George Garrett, a longtime colleague of the Press and the author of eight poetry volumes. (Say “the LSU poets” real fast with a southern drawl and you get the ridiculously wonderful moniker that poet Elizabeth Seydel Morgan’s young friend innocently mistook for this noble band. It’s an image Brendan Galvin has appropriated to a perfect fit in his poem “Yellow Shoe Poet,” written on behalf of his fellow “yellow shoes” across the years.) All 173 poems are taken from LSU Press books and were selected by the poets themselves, if living. Arranged alphabetically by author, they consist of at least one poem from every poet published by the Press. Goethe’s admonition that “one ought every day at least, to read a good poem” can find no better starting point than in The Yellow Shoe Poets.

All 175 poems in this collection are take from Louisiana State University Press books and were selected by the poets themselves, if living. Arranged alphabetically by author, they consist of at least one poem from every author published by the press.

Mississippi has produced outstanding writers in numbers far out of proportion to its population. Their contributions to American literature, including poetry, rank as enormous. Mississippi Poets: A Literary Guide showcases forty-seven poets associated with the state and assesses their work with the aim of appreciating it and its place in today’s culture. In Mississippi, the importance of poetry can no longer be doubted. It partakes, as Faulkner wrote, of the broad aim of all literature: “to uplift man’s heart.” In Mississippi Poets, author Catharine Savage Brosman introduces readers to the poets themselves, stressing their versatility and diversity. She describes their subject matter and forms, their books, and particularly representative or striking poems. Of broad interest and easy to consult, this book is both a source of information and a showcase. It highlights the organic connection between poetry by Mississippians and the indigenous music genres of the region, blues and jazz. No other state has produced such abundant and impressive poetry connected to these essential American forms. Brosman profiles and assesses poets from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Grounds for selection include connections between the poets and the state; the excellence and abundance of their work; its critical reception; and both local and national standing. Natives of Mississippi and others who have resided here draw equal consideration. As C. Liegh McInnis observed, “You do not have to be born in Mississippi to be a Mississippi writer. . . . If what happens in Mississippi has an immediate and definite effect on your work, you are a Mississippi writer.”

This definitive anthology assembles a wide-ranging retrospective of Gentry’s most celebrated poems alongside new, previously unpublished works. Jane Gentry (1941–2014) possessed an uncanny ability to spin quietly expansive and wise verses from small details, objects, and remembered moments. The hallmarks of her work are insight into nature, faith, the quotidian, and?perhaps most prominently?the grounding of her home and family in the state of Kentucky. This innovative poet and critic was for many years one of the animating spirits of literary life in the region. Gentry and her daughters collaborated with editor Julia Johnson to organize this definitive collection. Johnson uses Gentry’s own methodology to arrange the poems in sequences comparable to those found in her previous collections. This organization showcases the range of the poet’s work and the flexibility of her style, which is sometimes ironic and humorous; sometimes poignant; but always clear, intelligent, and revelatory. This volume includes two full-length collections of poetry in their entirety?A Garden in Kentucky and Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig. The final section features Gentry’s unpublished work, bringing together her early poems, verses written for loved ones, and a large group of more recent work that may have been intended for future collections. Alternately startling and heart-wrenching, The New and Collected Poems of Jane Gentry offers a valuable retrospective of the celebrated poet’s work.

This new edition of Southern Writers assumes its distinguished predecessor's place as the essential reference on literary artists of the American South. Broadly expanded and thoroughly revised, it boasts 604 entries-nearly double the earlier edition's-written by 264 scholars. For every figure major and minor, from the venerable and canonical to the fresh and innovative, a biographical sketch and chronological list of published works provide comprehensive, concise, up-to-date information. Here in one convenient source are the South's novelists and short story writers, poets and dramatists, memoirists and essayists, journalists, scholars, and biographers from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. What constitutes a "southern writer" is always a matter for debate. Editors Joseph M. Flora and Amber Vogel have used a generous definition that turns on having a significant connection to the region, in either a personal or literary sense. New to this volume are younger writers who have emerged in the quarter century since the dictionary's original publication, as well as older talents previously unknown or unacknowledged. For almost every writer found in the previous edition, a new biography has been commissioned. Drawn from the very best minds on southern literature and covering the full spectrum of its practitioners, Southern Writers is an indispensable reference book for anyone intrigued by the subject.

Going beyond exclusively national perspectives, this volume considers the reception of the ancient Greek poet Sappho and her first Latin translator, Catullus, as a literary pair who transmit poetic culture across the world from the early 20th century to the present. Sappho's and Catullus' reception has shaped a transnational network of poets and intellectuals, helping to define ideas of origins, gender, sexuality and national identities. This book shows that across time and cultures translations and rewritings of Sappho and Catullus articulate modernist poetics of myth and fragmentation, forms of confessionalism and post-modern pastiche. The inquiry focuses on Italian and North American poetry as two central yet understudied hubs of Sappho's and Catullus' modern reception, also linked by a rich mutual intellectual exchange: key case-studies include Giovanni Pascoli, Ezra Pound, H.D., Salvatore Quasimodo, Robert Lowell, Rosita Copioli and Anne Carson, and cover a wide range of unpublished archival material. Texts are analysed and compared through reception and translation theories and inserted within the current debate on the Classics as World Literature, demonstrating how sustained transnational poetic discourse employs the ancient pair to expand notions of literary origins and redefine poetry's relationship to human existence.

This collection of poetry by American poet Hilda Conkling is one of three collections published during her lifetime. Conkling composed all of her poetry verbally (her mother actually wrote down the poems) when she was between the ages of four and ten.