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 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 senses into 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.
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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. |