Tenth Anniversary Expanded Edition First released in 2011, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine was the debut poetry collection from Tennessee poet Jesse Graves and was awarded the 2011 Weatherford Award in Poetry from Berea College, the Book of the Year in Poetry Award from the Appalachian Writers’ Association, and the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. The poems in Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine take part in many of the traditions of lyric poetry, including elegies for lost loved ones, odes to the beauty of family and the natural world, expressed through a range of poetic forms and techniques. The 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition includes twelve new poems and an introduction by Matthew Wimberley. from “Emissaries” Some mornings when I’m reading early, no light yet but the table lamp, my left hand will run through scales along the spine of the open book. My hands keep their own remembrance buried in fine grooves of flesh. The fingers turn over ignitions, faucets, always attuned to their proper force, knuckles never breaking things unless my brain overpowers them. They’ve discovered spectacular terrains, soft enclosures I can never enter again. I send them ahead as scouts for survey, emissaries that flip the lights in every dark hallway of the future.

Basin Ghosts is a chapbook of original poems by Jesse Graves, author of Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine. Many poems in Basin Ghosts address places and themes that resonated in Graves’s first collection, which won both the Weatherford Award and the Appalachian Writers’ Association Book of the Year Award in Poetry. The poems in Basin Ghosts examine life in the rural South, changes that have occurred over generations in communities there, and the ways in which the past lives on through memory and attachment to the land. Grace Notes Leora never walked the quarter-mile of red dust to her bench at Big Sinks schoolhouse without carrying the hand-sewn satchel she used for an accordion case. The notes came to her out of some darkness, a cavity just inside her ear where the curve of a sound pushed through her fingers and into the buttons of that strange machine. Where did the accordion come from? The imprint read Vienna Austria 1904 and how it arrived to her in Capps Creek, Tennessee, the middle of the middle of nowhere will pass like the mystery of cloudburst, some graceful symmetry beyond this world and beyond the next.

In language both plainspoken and lyrical, East Tennessee poet Jesse Graves examines the connections that hold people together across generations and against the breaches of time and distance. The landscapes of his native region possess a mythic beauty and Graves writes of the animating force it can become in a poet's imagination. Graves's poems are haunted by the lost futures of lives cut short and by speculative narrations of omens and portents. For all the darkness visible in the world, Graves elevates the great joy of feeding birds, walking in the woods, and sharing a life, sometimes only in memory, with the people we love. Those who have passed on are remembered here and their stories become a source of light. The new work in MERCIFUL DAYS will remind readers why Ron Rash has said, These poems have the music, wisdom, and singular voice of a talent fully realized, and make abundantly clear that Jesse Graves is one of America's finest young poets.

Despite the stereotypes and misconceptions surrounding Appalachia, the region has nurtured and inspired some of the nation's finest writers. Featuring dozens of authors born into or adopted by the region over the past two centuries, Writing Appalachia showcases for the first time the nuances and contradictions that place Appalachia at the heart of American history. This comprehensive anthology covers an exceedingly diverse range of subjects, genres, and time periods, beginning with early Native American oral traditions and concluding with twenty-first-century writers such as Wendell Berry, bell hooks, Silas House, Barbara Kingsolver, and Frank X Walker. Slave narratives, local color writing, folklore, work songs, modernist prose -- each piece explores unique Appalachian struggles, questions, and values. The collection also celebrates the significant contributions of women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community to the region's history and culture. Alongside Southern and Central Appalachian voices, the anthology features northern authors and selections that reflect the urban characteristics of the region. As one text gives way to the next, a more complete picture of Appalachia emerges -- a landscape of contrasting visions and possibilities.

The poems in The Error of Nostalgia explore the relationships between individuals and their natural and urban environments in the American South and South America. These disparate locations serve as sites where, among other things, humans confront the perils of natural catastrophes, expatriation, urbanization, and crises of identity. “Richard Boada’s brilliant and self-torn poems mediate nature and the urbane. Their economies chafe, rousing teargas and vulcanism. They are not nostalgia, but ‘lucidities that appear when one goes home,’ ‘evidence of who we are.’” —Angela Ball “The poems in Richard Boada’s The Error of Nostalgia are quick and tactile, moving through landscapes and histories with the speed of fresh recognition, what Brodsky called the ‘accelerated thinking’ of poetry.” —Jesse Graves author, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine “These poems brim with sonic lushness, with musicality, and with a delicacy that reminds me of James Wright and Louise Glück. However, Boada’s poetry is his own: complex, pulsing, curious, and always surprising.” —William Wright author, Night Field Anecdote and Bledsoe

For more than fifty years Robert Morgan has brought to life the landscape, history and culture of the Southern Appalachia of his youth. In 30 acclaimed volumes, including poetry, short story collections, novels and nonfiction prose, he has celebrated an often marginalized region. His many honors include four NEA Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as television appearances (The Best American Poetry: New Stories from the South, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards). This first book on Morgan collects appreciations and analyses by some of his most dedicated readers, including fellow poets, authors, critics and scholars. An unpublished interview with him is included, along with an essay by him on the importance of sense of place, and a bibliography of publications by and about him.

The Poetics of American Song Lyrics is the first collection of academic essays that regards songs as literature and that identifies intersections between the literary histories of poems and songs. The essays by well-known poets and scholars including Pulitzer Prize winner Claudia Emerson, Peter Guralnick, Adam Bradley, David Kirby, Kevin Young, and many others, locate points of synthesis and separation so as to better understand both genres and their crafts. The essayists share a desire to write on lyrics in a way that moves beyond sociological, historical, and autobiographical approaches and explicates songs in relation to poetics. Unique to this volume, the essays focus not on a single genre but on folk, rap, hip hop, country, rock, indie, soul, and blues. The first section of the book provides a variety of perspectives on the poetic history and techniques within songs and poems, and the second section focuses on a few prominent American songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Michael Stipe. Through conversational yet in-depth analyses of songs, the essays discuss sonnet forms, dramatic monologues, Modernism, ballads, blues poems, confessionalism, Language poetry, Keatsian odes, unreliable narrators, personas, poetic sequences, rhythm, rhyme, transcription methods, the writing process, and more. While the strategies of explication differ from essay to essay, the nexus of each piece is an unveiling of the poetic history and poetic techniques within songs.