Books published by The University of Alabama Press

A critical analysis of the poetic representations and legacies of five landmark blue artists. The Blues Muse focuses on Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Robert Johnson, and Lead Belly, and traces the ways in which these artists and their personas have been invoked and developed throughout American poetry.

Explores a salient quality of much avant-garde American poetry that has so far lacked sustained treatment: namely, its role as a transactional art. Specifically Fredman describes this role as the ways it consistently engages in conversation, talk, correspondence, going beyond the scope of its own subjects and forms.