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This collection, the first of its kind, gathers original and previously published fiction and poetry from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer authors from Appalachia. Like much Appalachian literature, these works are pervaded with an attachment to family and the mountain landscape, yet balancing queer and Appalachian identities is an undertaking fraught with conflict. This collection confronts the problematic and complex intersections of place, family, sexuality, gender, and religion with which LGBTQ Appalachians often grapple.

With works by established writers such as Dorothy Allison, Silas House, Ann Pancake, Fenton Johnson, and Nickole Brown and emerging writers such as Savannah Sipple, Rahul Mehta, Mesha Maren, and Jonathan Corcoran, this collection celebrates a literary canon made up of writers who give voice to what it means to be Appalachian and LGBTQ.

Land and Sea was first published in 1978. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Although Philip Freneau is best known as the poet of the American Revolution, half his poems had nothing to do with the war, Professor Vitzthum points out, and this, the first systematic, in-depth study of Freneau's lyric poetry, provides a fresh perspective on the poet's non-political work. Demonstrating that there is a heretofore unrecognized pattern of land-sea imagery and symbolism in Freneau's best work. Professor Vitzthum traces changes reflected in this imagery to developments in the poet's thought, which in turn related to major intellectual and literary trends in revolutionary and early republican America. An introductory chapter assesses twentieth century biographical and critical estimates of Freneau, outlines the key themes in his work, and links his thirty-year career as sailor and ship captain to his creation of a covert, symbolistic poetic method. The following five chapters chronologically discuss Freneau's non-political poems from 1772 through 1815. Professor Vitzthum concludes that Freneau was not the derivative and unsuccessful artist he is currently thought to have been but, rather, one of America's genuinely important poets.

The core of Larks is rural and mythic and true, existential and domestic, tender while full of sharp grief and documentation. Circling genealogies of silence and harm in a southern family, Larks centers on the relationship and memories of three sisters and Ovid’s telling of Philomel. In a landscape inhabited as much by farm animals (cows, goats, chickens, and barn kittens) as by the family, the lyric poem parses and articulates the self’s history—from the experience of a sister’s home birth to the traumatic erasure (and recovery) of the speaker’s memory. A work of poetic memoir, Larks asks if poetry can hold the heaviest truths we carry. The answer is a resounding yes.

Inspired by actual case histories of long-term missing African American children, this provocative and heartrending collection of poems evokes the experience of what it means to be among the missing in contemporary America. This thought-provoking collection of persona poems looks at absence from the standpoint of the witnesses surrounding the void and offers an intimate depiction of those impossible moments of aftermath lived by those who remain accounted for and present. While enabling us to question our own sense of identity, this unique collection of poems reveals the blurred edges of separation between them and us and the impact that the missing have upon our present and future.


Finalist, NAACP Image Awards

There is a large intelligence present in Terese Svoboda's poetry and not a shred of sentimentality. From the dramatic coming-of-age in the title poem to the question posed in the last section, "What will I say to my child as it snows / that last winter's papery afterglow?" she continually searches for a responsible, compassionate world, one in which the only illusion is art.

The mythological central poem, "The Ranchhand's Daughter," shows the gods of isolation and incest warring against each other, destroying a triangle of love and cut into the granite-faced Badlands. It is only in the sensuous landscape of the domestic that possible redemption occurs: the father who dreams of running for president, the mother who signs in the mirror, the couple in the shower with "confidence rising between them." Faced with the inevitable losses, Svoboda strives for meaning and beauty.

Learning by Heart brings together a unique and diverse collection of poems about the experience of school as seen through the eyes of America's best contemporary poets. These poets capture the educational process not only in the classroom but as it takes place in libraries and hallways, on playing fields and at dances. Alternately joyous and defiant, they demonstrate how it is that young people come to find their place in the world.

Most of the poems in this anthology were written between 1970 and 1995, a period that encompasses both the halcyon years of poets-in-the-schools programs and the primary and secondary school years of many of the poets included. Their poems define school in that most contemporary sense — “with a multitude of voices”—reflecting perspectives from African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, and Native American as well as Anglo American backgrounds, from both public and private schools in rural and urban environments.

Learning by Heart offers a profound and timely statement about schools and learning as well as the role of art in education. Finally, these poems validate that most important lesson: even the most common of experiences is worthy of creative expression.

In May 1860, Walt Whitman published a third edition of Leaves of Grass. His timing was compelling. Printed during a period of regional, ideological, and political divisions, written by a poet intimately concerned with the idea of a United States as “essentially the greatest poem,” this new edition was Whitman’s last best hope for national salvation. Now available in a facsimile edition, Leaves of Grass, 1860 faithfully reproduces Whitman’s attempt to create a “Great construction of the New Bible” to save the nation on the eve of civil war and, for the first time, frames the book in historical rather than literary terms.

In his third edition, Whitman added 146 new poems to the 32 that comprised the second edition, reorganized the book into a bible of American civic religion that could be cited chapter and verse, and included erotic poetry intended to bind the nation in organic harmony. This 150th anniversary edition includes a facsimile reproduction of the original 1860 volume, a thought-provoking introduction by antebellum historian and Whitman scholar Jason Stacy that situates Whitman in nineteenth-century America, and annotations that provide detailed historical context for Whitman’s poems.

A profoundly rich product of a period when America faced its greatest peril, this third edition finds the poet transforming himself into a prophet of spiritual democracy and the Whitman we celebrate today—boisterous, barbaric, and benevolent. Reprinting it now continues the poet’s goal of proclaiming for “the whole of America for each / individual, without exception . . . uncompromising liberty and equality.”

In her first magical collection of poetry, Jennifer Elise Foerster weaves together a mythic and geographic exploration of a woman’s coming of age in a dislocated time. Leaving Tulsa, a book of road elegies and laments, travels from Oklahoma to the edges of the American continent through landscapes at once stark and lush, ancient and apocalyptic. The imagery that cycles through the poems—fire, shell, highway, wing—gives the collection a rich lyrical-dramatic texture. Each poem builds on a theme of searching for a lost “self”—an “other” America—that crosses biblical, tribal, and ecological mythologies.

In Leaving Tulsa, Foerster is not afraid of the strange or of estrangement. The narrator occupies a space in between and navigates the offbeat experiences of a speaker that is of both Muscogee and European heritage. With bold images and candid language, Foerster challenges the perceptions of what it means to be Native, what it means to be a woman, and what it means to be an American today. Ultimately, these brave and luminous poems engage and shatter the boundaries of time, self, and continent.

Foerster’s journey transcends both geographic space and the confines of the page to live vividly in the mind of the reader.

Reckons with the rituals of violence that underpin the American prison system, asking readers to consider the act and complications of looking at violence and suffering.

In Lethal Theater, Susannah Nevison offers a stark and lyrical reckoning with the hidden architectures of the American prison system. These poems inhabit the charged territory where medicine and punishment converge, revealing how the body becomes both patient and instrument under state control. Moving through histories of wartime confinement, interrogation, and isolation, Nevison writes a poetry of witness to the carceral state, illuminating what is so often kept from view.

With precision and moral force, Nevison examines the shadows cast by medical experimentation on imprisoned bodies, the blurred boundary between hospital anesthesia and the drugs used in lethal injection protocols, and the rituals of surveillance that shape life behind bars. This is a work rooted in the medical humanities of confinement, an inquiry into how suffering is recorded, observed, and, at times, rendered invisible.

Lethal Theater makes visible the brutal logics beneath state-sanctioned pain and insists on the urgency—and responsibility—of looking closely at what the nation asks its incarcerated to endure.