In 2005 Margaret Jones Bolsterli learned that her great-great-grandfather was a free mulatto named Jordan Chavis, who owned an antebellum plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi. The news was a shock; Bolsterli had heard about the plantation in family stories told during her Arkansas Delta childhood, but Chavis’s name and race had never been mentioned. With further exploration Bolsterli found that when Chavis’s children crossed the Mississippi River between 1859 and 1875 for exile in Arkansas, they passed into the white world, leaving the family’s racial history completely behind.

Kaleidoscope is the story of this discovery, and it is the story, too, of the rise and fall of the Chavis fortunes in Mississippi, from the family’s first appearance on a frontier farm in 1829 to ownership of over a thousand acres and the slaves to work them by 1860. Bolsterli learns that in the 1850s, when all free colored people were ordered to leave Mississippi or be enslaved, Jordan Chavis’s white neighbors successfully petitioned the legislature to allow him to remain, unmolested, even as three of his sons and a daughter moved to Arkansas and Illinois. She learns about the agility with which the old man balanced on a tightrope over chaos to survive the war and then take advantage of the opportunities of newly awarded citizenship during Reconstruction. The story ends with the family’s loss of everything in the 1870s, after one of the exiled sons returns to Mississippi to serve in the Reconstruction legislature and a grandson attempts unsuccessfully to retain possession of the land. In Kaleidoscope, long-silenced truths are revealed, inviting questions about how attitudes toward race might have been different in the family and in America if the truth about this situation and thousands of others like it could have been told before.

Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths, Sholeh Wolpé's third collection of poems, is a surreal journey of sorrows and sins, of love, ghosts, and Saudi princes, of banishment inside one's own skin. Wild in its leaps and images, these poems explore personal and psychological exile from a marriage, lovers, expectations, and finally, country.

This comprehensive guide includes taxonomic keys to the families, genera, species, and infraspecific taxa of all the known vascular plants of Arkansas.

A trio of short dramas set in the South and spanning 1968 to the present, King Me features compelling characters and relevant themes that examine our ongoing understanding of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Bound by Blood, #communicate, and Paradox in the Parish richly dramatize three of King's popular quotes, offering creative methods for teaching history and social studies and setting the stage for inspiring discussions for contemporary theater goers. Readers and audiences will also learn about current civil rights issues such as the Jena Six Case in Jena, Louisiana, while appreciating, or appreciating anew, how King impacted the lives of his own and future generations.

This stunning collection heralds the debut of a most gifted poet, one who turns to the formal traditions of the past to celebrate and elegize our vast and transient world in which human stories—tragedies and triumphs—are invariably bound up with nature. K. E. Duffin’s poems are about transformations, from life to death and from death to life, from the sprawl of experience to the spare music of the poem that can reach the future only through memory. These are poems that court the ear and eye alike. They surprise us with their elegant forms and rich, classical themes; they delight us with their force of language and delicious renderings of the vast complications of things.

These poems are the best poems from Jonathan Holden's first seven books, four of which have won significant national competitions: Design for a House (The Devins Award, 1972), Leverage (The AWP Award Series, 1982), The Names of the Rapids (The Juniper Prize, 1985), and The Sublime (The Vassar Miller Prize, 1995). Holden's command of language is staggering, and his range of subjects is extensive. He writes about sex, mathematics, nationalism, propaganda, baseball, and blackmail with an emotional honesty that pushes his observations in surprising directions that the reader can never anticipate. These poems have a sustained leanness and concentrated power. Holden is a craftsman whose poems carry one along with the vigor and the inevitability of rapids and the illumination of chain lightning. His dramatic lyrics, like those of the late Richard Hugo, evoke a quality of light in the studied landscapes whose common denominator is solitude but where, through art, beauty and the heartening sense of human community can coexist.