Often celebrated as the Literary State of the South, and quoted to have more writers per capita than any other state in the Union, Mississippi remains famous for its fiction writers: William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Barry Hannah, Willie Morris, and Walker Percy, among many others. Relatively unsung are those who dedicate themselves to the older craft of poetry. This book seeks to alleviate that absence and collect the best poetry written in contemporary Mississippi, to share with curious readers the luminous verses this beautiful state engenders. The second edition of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume II: Mississippi, seeks to continue the aspiration of the series: to take a snapshot of contemporary poetry in the American South and to observe how the "sense of place" manifests itself in the work of native poets or those just passing through. Featured in this edition, poets Natasha Trethewey, Gordon Weaver, Angela Ball, Paul Ruffin, Julia Johnson, T.R. Hummer, and many others reveal the Magnolia State as a place in which brilliant art continues to bloom.

Edited by William Wright and Paul Ruffin, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume V: Georgia brings together over one hundred of Georgia's poets, including David Bottoms, Natasha Trethewey, Leon Stokesbury, Thomas Lux, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Alice Friman, Judson Mitcham, and Stephen Corey, as well as myriad other luminous voices. The volume marks the fifth of the seriesArt & Literature has called “one of the most ambitious projects in contemporary Southern letters.”

An omnibus of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama written by Mississippi authors

Fiction recounting the experience of growing up in the Deep South

These poems fall overlapping silos: poems about the making of poems; about time's abrasions; about nature's benign/malevolent indifference; about the cultural tattoos of growing up in the Mississippi Delta; about women, guilt, and love; and about the inescapable separateness of the first-person pronoun.

The poems in this anthology hold true to mountain cultures strong story telling tradition, relating both the toil and the serenity of life lived on hill farms, in coal mining camps, and in small rural towns.