Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry

by Daniel Cross Turner (Editor), William Wright (Editor)

Overview

A collection of contemporary poems exploring the grit of work, love, and the land down South

Daniel Cross Turner and William Wright's anthology Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry centers on the darker side of southern experience while presenting a remarkable array of poets from diverse backgrounds in the American South. As tough-minded as they are high-minded, the sixty contemporary poets and two hundred poems anthologized in Hard Lines enhance the powerful genre of "Grit Lit."

The volume gathers the work of poets who have for some decades formed the heart of southern poetry as well as that of emerging voices who will soon become significant figures in southern literature. These poems sting our sensesinto awareness of a gritty world down South: hard work, hard love, hard drinking, hard times; but they also explore the importance of the land and rural experience, as well as race-, gender-, and class-based conflicts.

Readers will see, hear (for poetry is meant to ring in the ears), and feel (for poetry is meant to beat in the blood); there is plenty of raucousness in this anthology.And yet the cultural conflicts that ignite southern wildness are often depicted in a manner that is lyrical without becoming lugubrious, mournful but not maudlin. Some of these poets are coming to terms with a visibly transforming culture—a "roughness" in and of itself. Indeed many of these poets are helping to change the definition of the South. The anthology also features biographical information on each poet in addition to further reading suggestions and scholarly sources on contemporary poetry.

Featured Poets: Betty Adcock, David Bottoms, Kathryn Stripling Byer, James Dickey, Rodney Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ron Rash, Dave Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Charles Wright, Fred Chappell, Kelly Cherry, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Kate Daniels, Kwame Dawes, Claudia Emerson, Andrew Hudgins, T. R. Hummer, Robert Morgan, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Dan Albergotti, Tarfia Faizullah, Forrest Gander, Terrance Hayes, Judy Jordan, John Lane, Michael McFee, Paul Ruffin, Steve Scafidi, Jake Adam York

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611176377
Publisher:	University of South Carolina Press
Publication date:	04/01/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Daniel Cross Turner is the author of Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South and coeditor of Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture. His numerous scholarly essays, interviews, and reviews focus on modern and contemporary Southern writers. Turner is an associate professor of English at Coastal Carolina University.

William Wright is the author of four full-length collections of poems, including Tree Heresies and Night Field Anecdote. Editor of the multivolume Southern Poetry Anthology, Wright serves as assistant editor for Shenandoah as well as founding editor for Town Creek Poetry. His essays and creative writing have recently appeared in Oxford American, Southern Poetry Review, AGNI, the Kenyon Review, and many other journals.

What People are Saying About This

Casey Clabough

Deftly arranging poets both new and old, Hard Lines is at once easy on the eyes and stimulating to the mind—an anthology to be read and subsequently consulted.

Ernest Suarez

Hard Lines is a bold and compelling anthology. Turner and Wright's selections focus on verse with ominous qualities, but the human experience and the natural world are encompassed in all their paradoxical dimensions. Some of the poems will be familiar and others are unknown gems. The cumulative effect is powerful; it's difficult to put this book down.

Michael Kreyling

Turner and Wright have done us all a great, and intriguing, favor in Hard Lines. First, they have made it possible, in our classrooms, to give chapter and verse in discussions of the politics of 20th century American poetry.... And second, Turner and Wright have made it possible to fantasize a review of Hard Lines by Helen Vendler. If she had issue with Rita Dove's editing, what would she say about this?

Keith Cartwright

Hard Lines... carries the full sonic and spiritual load of southerly experience along lines that have given even surrogate southerners like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards their whole rolling pulse of musication. It's a local mix for a global audience. This is a collection that rocks, rolls, and second lines its readers through freshly imprinted soundings of poetic narrative and voice.

George Singleton

Well it's about time for this great anthology, Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry. I mean, it's about Time. Time and Timelessness. Editors Wright and Turner offer a wonderful selection of writers wrestling with, and extolling, the most intricate, beautiful, and perplexing aspects of our South.

Editorial Reviews

This book is essential for anyone interested in the literature of the American South! These editors not only provide a look at those poets who, for some years, have formed the core of Southern poetry, they also introduce us to a great number of exciting new voices. In rounding up this group, Turner and Wright have done an outstanding job!

David Bottoms

Hard Lines is best read slowly, a few strong poems at a time. It celebrates the enduring traditions of the narrative in Southern poetics, and the collection is at most thought-provoking when poems embody a present-South that interrogates its past-South shadow.

Grist Journal

"Hard Lines is best read slowly, a few strong poems at a time. It celebrates the enduring traditions of the narrative in Southern poetics, and the collection is at most thought-provoking when poems embody a present-South that interrogates its past-South shadow." -- Grist Journal


"Hard Lines is a bold and compelling anthology. Turner and Wright's selections focus on verse with ominous qualities, but the human experience and the natural world are encompassed in all their paradoxical dimensions. Some of the poems will be familiar and others are unknown gems. The cumulative effect is powerful; it's difficult to put this book down."--Ernest Suarez, Catholic University, vice president, Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers


"Deftly arranging poets both new and old, Hard Lines is at once easy on the eyes and stimulating to the mind--an anthology to be read and subsequently consulted."--Casey Clabough, author of Inhabiting Contemporary Southern & Appalachian Literature


"Turner and Wright have done us all a great, and intriguing, favor in Hard Lines. First, they have made it possible, in our classrooms, to give chapter and verse in discussions of the politics of 20th century American poetry. . . . And second, Turner and Wright have made it possible to fantasize a review of Hard Lines by Helen Vendler. If she had issue with Rita Dove's editing, what would she say about this?"--Michael Kreyling, Vanderbilt University


"Well it's about time for this great anthology, Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry. I mean, it's about Time. Time and Timelessness. Editors Wright and Turner offer a wonderful selection of writers wrestling with, and extolling, the most intricate, beautiful, and perplexing aspects of our South."--George Singleton, author of Calloustown


"This book is essential for anyone interested in the literature of the American South! These editors not only provide a look at those poets who, for some years, have formed the core of Southern poetry, they also introduce us to a great number of exciting new voices. In rounding up this group, Turner and Wright have done an outstanding job!"--David Bottoms


"Hard Lines . . . carries the full sonic and spiritual load of southerly experience along lines that have given even "surrogate southerners" like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards their whole rolling pulse of musication. It's a local mix for a global audience. This is a collection that rocks, rolls, and second lines its readers through freshly imprinted soundings of poetic narrative and voice."--Keith Cartwright, author of Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways

From the Publisher