List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction Pt. I: The Criteria for Comradeship1: The Importance of Being Regular 2: Gender, Age, and Marital Status 3: Occupation, Ethnicity, and Neighborhood Pt. II: The Gentle Art of Clubbing4: Drinking Folkways 5: Clubbing by Treat 6: Clubbing by CollectionPt. III: More Lore of the Barroom7: Games and Gambling 8: Talk and Storytelling 9: Songs and Singing 10: The Free Lunch ConclusionNotesIndex Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

In the winter of 1990, Oklahomas economy is still recovering from the crash of the states oil boom and the failure of many a family farm. Despite the burst bubble, illicit drug trafficking is thriving, and cocaine is king. Amidst the rubble is Ringera down-and-out racecar star whos desperate for a comeback after a four-year stretch in prison for transporting marijuana. When Ringers old drug-dealing friend, Darryl-Jack Chaney, offers him an iffy second chance in the form of a small town bank job, Ringer accepts the risk as getaway driver, figuring why not? Hes got nowhere to go but up. Instead of making a payday, though, Ringer ends up double-crossed by his pal, who leaves him for dead and absconds not only with the cash but Ringers wife Julie, too. Ringer survives the murderous betrayal and sets out on a different kind of comeback. No longer does he seek the glamour of racecar driving. Instead, hes out for bloody revenge. Ringer embarks on a rampage of guns, deadly car chases, and a showdown only one man will survive, proving its never good to cross a man with nothing left to lose.

News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936-1945 is a powerful account of how civilian poets confront the urgent problem of writing about war. The six poets Rachel Galvin discusses-W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Raymond Queneau, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, and César Vallejo-all wrote memorably about war, but still they felt they did not have authority to write about what they had not experienced firsthand. Consequently, these writers developed a wartime poetics engaging with both classical rhetoric and the daily news in texts that encourage readers to take critical distance from war culture. News of War is the first book to address the complex relationship between poetry and journalism. In two chapters on civilian literatures of the Spanish Civil War, five chapters on World War II, and an epilogue on contemporary poetry about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Galvin combines analysis of poetic form with attention to socio-historical context, drawing on rare archival sources and furnishing new translations. In comparing how poets wrestled with the limits of bodily experience, and with the ethical, political, and aesthetic problems they faced, Galvin theorizes the concept of meta-rhetoric, a type of ethical self-interference. She argues that civilian writers employed strategies drawn from journalism precisely to question the objectivity and facticity of war reporting. Civilian poetics of the 1930s and 1940s was born from writers' desire to acknowledge their own socio-historical position and to write poems that responded ethically to the gravest events of their day.