Books in the Southern Messenger Poets series

In this eloquent long poem, Claudia Emerson employs the voices of two family members on a small southern farm to examine the universal complexities of place, generation, memory, and identity.

Sometimes a fact swings down like a hammer and we are changed. The fact of loss, the fact of desire, and all the wild, unruly facts of history hammer down and sparks fly up. This, then, is a collection of facts.

Written by the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Pharaoh, Pharaohis a meditation on time, memory, inheritance, and the irony of loss, loss of one's land, of one's past, of love itself.

A second collection of autobiographical "memory poems" by David Kirby. Kirby confides in narrative poems the events he actually or vicariously experienced - as a child, a teen, a young man - as well as some future scenes he imagines. Little Richard, Henry James and others all feature.