edited by Bill Lavender
contributions by Joel Dailey, Brett Evans, Jessica Freeman, Skip Fox, Bob Grumman, Ken Harris, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, Joy Lahey, Jake Berry, John Lowther, Dana Lisa Lustig, Camille Martin, Jerry McGuire, Thomas Meyer, A. di Michele, Mark Prejsnar, Randy Prunty, Alex Rawls, David Thomas Roberts, Christy Sheffield Sanford, Hank Lazer, Stephanie Williams, Andy Young, Seth Young, Dave Brinks, James Sanders, Marla Jernigan, Kalamu ya Salaam, Jim Leftwich, Lorenzo Thomas, Bill Lavender, Ralph Adamo, Sandy Baldwin, Daniel Aaron and Holley Blackwell
introduction by Hank Lazer
University of Alabama Press, 2002
Cloth: 978-0-8173-1240-4 | eISBN: 978-0-8173-8289-6 | Paper: 978-0-8173-1241-1
Library of Congress Classification PS551.A56 2003
Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6080110975

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Gathers the best work of flourishing but often-neglected avant-garde southern poets

Another South is an anthology of poetry from contemporary southern writers who are working in forms that are radical, innovative, and visionary. Highly experimental and challenging in nature, the poetry in this volume, with its syntactical disjunctions, formal revolutions, and typographic playfulness, represents the direction of a new breed of southern writing that is at once universal in its appeal and regional in its flavor.

Focusing on poets currently residing in the South, the anthology includes both emerging and established voices in the national and international literary world. From the invocations of Andy Young’s “Vodou Headwashing Ceremony” to the blues-informed poems of Lorenzo Thomas and Honorée Jeffers, from the different voicings of John Lowther and Kalamu ya Salaam to the visual, multi-genre art of Jake Berry, David Thomas Roberts, and Bob Grumman, the poetry in Another South is rich in variety and enthusiastic in its explorations of new ways to embody place and time. These writers have made the South lush with a poetic avant-garde all its own, not only redefining southern identity and voice but also offering new models of what is possible universally through the medium of poetry.

Hank Lazer’s introductory essay about “Kudzu textuality” contextualizes the work by these contemporary innovators. Like the uncontrollable runaway vine that entwines the southern landscape, their poems are hyperfertile, stretching their roots and shoots relentlessly, at once destructive and regenerative. In making a radical departure from nostalgic southern literary voices, these poems of polyvocal abundance are closer in spirit to "speaking in tongues" or apocalyptic southern folk art—primitive, astonishing, and mystic.