Studies in the Fantastic [#11]
Studies in the Fantastic is a journal devoted to the Speculative, Fantastic, and Weird in literature and other arts.
Contents in this issue: “Pigs All the Way Down: Capitalist Realism and Neo-reaction in Thomas Ligotti’s My Work Is Not Yet Done” by Jonathan Newell • “Antiquarianism Underground: The Twentieth-century Alliterative Revival in American Genre Poetry” by Dennis Wilson Wise • “Speaking Horrors: Fantasy, Gender, and Race in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon” by Susan Savage Lee • “The Great Unmasking: Adaptation and the Problem of Identity in V for Vendetta” by Kwasu Tembo • Interviews with Justina Ireland by Christina Connor and Sarah Juliet Lauro by Asijit • Review by Jenna Jorgensen
Paperback Edition | $20.00
Studies in the Fantastic [#10]
Studies in the Fantastic is a journal devoted to the Speculative, Fantastic, and Weird in literature and other arts.
Contents in this issue: “Clean Slates, Marked Bodies: Dollhouse, the [Re-]Programming of the Mind, and the Gendered Labor of a Cyborg” by Ksenia Firsova • “The Fragmentation and Recovery of Zdzisław Beksiński” by Joseph Rex Young • “The Dangers of Gothic Sexuality in Crimson Peak and Penny Dreadful” by Amy Montz • “The Great Unmasking: Adaptation and the Problem of Identity in V for Vendetta” by Kwasu Tembo • Reviews by Rachel Cordasco, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Chera Kee, Jeremy Lakoff, and Steven Shaviro
Paperback Edition | $20.00
My Husband Would
My Husband Would is the fourth full-length collection of poems by Benjamin S. Grossberg, winner of the 2008 Tampa Review Prize and the 2010 Lambda Literary Award. Set at the crossroads of middle age, this book investigates love and family—both the families we are born into and those we create for ourselves. Funny, cinematic, and inventive, the poems recount family lore—a mother’s options, the clouded circumstances of a distant marriage—side by side with the perplexities of contemporary romance. And they are charged with the recent national legalization of same-sex marriage—for many, a radical dawning of possibility, even as it quickly becomes uncontroversial, even unremarkable, in large parts of the country. These poems show us that marriage and family are a learned project, one passed down, to be attempted by each new generation as best it can with the realities at hand. Grossberg surveys the strangeness of what our parents and families teach us about intimacy and what we ourselves learn as we stumble through the landscape of contemporary dating. He finally casts his gaze to future possibility: what we would be, would do, if we could. As Grossberg notes, amid the bustle of our lives, the relationships that help us understand who we are, those losses and discoveries, begin with the simplest impulses, like “the courage/ to go up and say hello.”
Count Four.
JUST PUBLISHED: Count Four, winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, is a book about trying to reconcile the conflicting elements of one’s identity and attempting to understand and articulate the forces that are shaping it. Many of the poems in the collection were written over years Keith Kopka spent as a musician in and around the East Coast punk scene. They try to make sense of how the things and people he loves most in this environment are also what are most likely to destroy him.
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Studies in the Fantastic [#9]
Studies in the Fantastic is a journal devoted to the Speculative, Fantastic, and Weird in literature and other arts.
Contents in this issue: “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Weird Temporalities” by Jordan S. Carroll and Alison Sperling • “Xenological Temporalities in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Lovecraft, and Transgender Experiences” by Adriana Knouf • “What is the Future? Weirdness and Black Time in Sorry to Bother You” by Stefanie K. Dunning • “It Might Have Been a Million Years Later: Abyssal Time in William Hope Hodgson’s Weird Fiction” by Timothy S. Murphy • “The Weird Time of Fossils: Irrational Ontologies” by Bethany Doane • “Slow Burn: Dreadful Kinship and the Weirdness of Heteronormativity in It Follows” by Tyler Bradway • “A Museum, like a Tomb, is a Whole Theatre of Weird Temporality: an interview with Sofia Samatar” by Andy Hageman and Sofia Samatar • Reviews: “The Promise of Prose: Richard Stanley’s The Color Out of Space and Film Absorption” by Donald L. Anderson • “Saving the Future by Tidal Pool Rules: A Review of Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts” by Katherine Buse • “A review of Jonathan Newell’s A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937” by W. Andrew Shephard • “Archaeologies of the Future: A review of Emilija Škarnulytė’s t1/2” by KT Thompson
Tampa in Civil War and Reconstruction
It was a time when the United States exploded in war and its people battled for the nation’s soul after peace finally arrived; yet, up until now no one has lifted for Tampans the heavy curtain that has barred them from the sight of their own dynamic Civil War and Reconstruction past. Instead of the mostly tranquil scenes of early Tampa previously depicted as the remote Gulf village of the 1860s and 1870s, historian Canter Brown Jr., here reveals a place and time teeming with conflict, danger, treachery, privations, and disasters natural and man-made. But, that is not all. The book sensitively explores the quiet and sometimes not-so-quiet heroism of men and women, black and white, who held their community together and who doggedly persisted in the belief that a better day would come. Brown’s narrative style draws the reader into the lives and experiences of historical characters and pursues the twists and turns that often reveal seemingly clear actions and motivations to be something else entirely. One remarkable passage typifies many others as it explores how a lionized Confederate hero’s heralded defiance of Union authority actually constituted a blunder that almost resulted in Tampa’s complete destruction. Based on superb research into previously neglected primary sources, Tampa in Civil War and Reconstruction offers a compelling and complex view of the period’s impact upon a tiny civilian outpost that would grow to be one of Florida’s and the nation’s great cities. This is a history that resonates with insight and humanity. This is a story that you will want to read and to share.
Tampa Before the Civil War
Tampa’s story stretches back 175 years to a remote military outpost carved from Florida’s untamed swamps and jungles. Early residents survived intense heat, humidity, tropical diseases, hurricanes, and even Indian attacks to establish Fort Brooke, and later to develop the village they called Tampa. As historian Canter Brown, Jr., observes in his introduction, “Its subsequent history involved fascinating tales of remarkable people engaged in significant events that continue to resonate in our lives today.”
Tampa Before the Civil War provides the best available account of the early years of one of Florida’s most important cities. And while it communicates the dates and facts, including the results of the latest historical research, it does much more than that. This book captures the drama, adventure, and complexity of the early pioneers and soldiers. At its heart are the people who gave the settlement its character and culture: “Those people, much more so than with the populations of many Florida and southern cities, hailed from a broad range of backgrounds, origins, and ethnic roots. Diverse from its beginnings, the city grew to occupy a special place in Florida’s history and in the hearts of its residents.” Here is history you can bring to life and take to heart.
Pioneer Days on Tampa’s Gulf Beaches
Edited with an introduction and notes by R. Wayne Ayers
Though Spanish fishermen from Cuba camped on the key, and native Tocobaga Indians visited in an earlier era, the beaches were virtually unsettled when George Lizotte arrived. An early postcard of Lizotte on a fishing skiff shows the island’s only two structures. They were the home of original settler Captain Zephaniah Phillips and a tent erected by Lizotte to house workers building his Hotel Bonhomie. George Lizotte would figure prominently in the barrier islands’ history, both as an observer and participant. As an eyewitness to the events taking place, Lizotte gives a fascinating inside look at the Gulf beaches’ transformation from a primitive settlement to a major tourist destination.
Go Sound the Trumpet!
“The African American experience in Florida from the Spanish era to today, within the regional and national context, is presented by Florida A&M University in original scholarly essays and classic selections in Go Sound The Trumpet! Selections in Florida’s African American History edited by David H. Jackson Jr. and Canter Brown Jr . . . A much needed addition to Florida history as an African American history reader, ideally suited for schools. Clearly written, it contains 367 pages, 55 illustrations, and index.” —Book Reviewer Spessard Stone in Cracker Barrel
Lays in Summer Lands
Rediscovered after more than a century of neglect, this important 1879 collection of poems by the first African American ever elected to the U.S. Congress will surprise and move new generations of readers. J. Willis Menard grew up in frontier Illinois as a virtual neighbor of Abraham Lincoln, went on to serve in the Lincoln administration, and later became an influential editor, journalist, and political activist in Florida, where he was also elected to the Florida State Legislature.
For the first time in print since the 1879 edition, the poems gain new resonance thanks to accompanying essays and notes by the editors—Larry Eugene Rivers, Richard Mathews, and Canter Brown Jr. Here is a rich and inspiring book brimming with history, intellect, emotion, and literary grace.
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Studies in the Fantastic [#8]
Studies in the Fantastic is a journal devoted to the Speculative, Fantastic, and Weird in literature and other arts. Contents for this issue:
Visualizing Edgar Allan Poe for a New Century: The Early Twentieth-Century Illustrators
Tony Magistrale
Holly Black’s The Darkest Part of the Forest: Coming of Age in Dialogue with Fairy Tales
Anelise Farris
“People Change as Much as Oceans”: Posthumanism in Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Jen Harrison
Urban Fantasy, Interconnectedness, and Ecological Disaster: Reading Anne Bishop’s The Others Series
Peter Melville
Reviews
The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games
Cameron Kunzelman
George A. Romero Archival Collection, University of Pittsburgh
Sonia Lupher
Sometimes Dead is Better: A Review of Pet Sematary
Lauren Milici
Wild Persistence
The poems in Wild Persistence often involve moments when the human and natural worlds intersect: a Sand-hill Crane dancing at the window of a grieving woman, a copperhead snake confronting a gardener, a billboard photo of a missing child slowly being eroded by weather and the passage of time. Although these poems mourn numerous losses, they celebrate the world in which such losses take place, turning for perspective to nature with its cyclical renewals and to the resilience of the human spirit.
After Earth
Part elegy, part ode, part pastoral, part sci-fi, After Earth looks back through history in order to consider history’s end. Many of the poems are drawn from the concerns of a father for his children, from the impulse to record the Earth, to preserve what’s slipping away, and to heal, if poems can, the bifurcation of nature and civilization. Reveling in the ornate as well as the plain, these poems cultivate astonishment not in the promise of another world, but in the here and now, turning “what is wavering or tattered into permanence,” and praising all they can, as Auden says we must, “for being and for happening.”
Studies in the Fantastic [#7]
Guest Editor’s Introduction: No More Room in Hell: Reanimation, Consumption, and Undead Media
By Sonia Lupher
Global Racial Capitalism and the Asian American Zombie in Ling Ma’s Severance
By Aanchal Saraf
#1BillionForThriller: Revival of “Dead” Content on YouTube
By Kelsey Cummings
Fungal Zombies and Tentacular Thinking: The Chthonic Mother in the Game The Last of Us
By Geneveive Newman
Pressing Rewind: New Encounters with Analog Memories in Ross Sutherland’s Stand By for Tape Back-Up
By Jordan Z. Adler
If the Goo Sticks: Streamlining Slime with Goosebumps on Canada’s YTV Network
By Pat Bonner
“Living Hell”: Fulci’s Eternal City
By Daniel Sacco
The Living Dead in Post-Soviet Cultural Consumption
By Denis Saltykov
Studies in the Fantastic [#6]
“Transitional Gothic: Hammer’s Gothic Revival and New Horror”
By Adam Charles Hart
“Like Clockwork: French Automatons in Life and Literature”
By W. Bradley Holley
“The Politics of Precarity in William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy”
By Bryan Yazell
“From The Day After to The 100: Nuclear Weapons on Television”
By Steven Holmes
“Creepy Atmospheres and Weird Narration in The OA”
By Steen Ledet Christiansen
Tasting Like Gravity: Rondeaux and Other Poems
With drawings by Jeanne Clark Meinke
Tasting Like Gravity brings new poems from Florida’s poet laureate, Peter Meinke, with an emphasis on the roundeaux form. The book also includes a short essay on rondeaux by the poet and selected drawings by Jeanne Clark Meinke.
Black Hole Factory
A black hole is a region of space-time with such strong gravitational effects that nothing—not even particles and electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from inside it. In Black Hole Factory, poet Eric Smith writes his way into and out of such holes with a commitment to the history and craftsmanship of the well-shaped poem. He compresses experience, intellect, and feeling within concentrated stanzas of compelling density. Even traditional rhyme and meter become sources of surprise and innovation in his hands. The book has poems that communicate impressive control, intellect, and wit—poems that cultivate ironic self-awareness and detachment on the part of both poet and reader. And then there are breakthrough moments giving up both irony and control in which poet and reader experience a kind of gravitational collapse powerful enough to deform and reshape space and time. In the end, Eric Smith has shaped a profound and accomplished manuscript of deep personal engagement graced by moving, open flights of lyricism.
The Danahy Fiction Prize | Ten Years, Ten Stories
There is reason to celebrate as the Danahy Fiction Prize completes its first decade and moves forward. This collection of the first ten Danahy Prize stories seems to be one of the most appropriate ways to observe the milestone. It is a chance to showcase ten talented writers who deserve to be even more widely known. And it is a chance to recognize and thank Paul and Georgia Danahy for their generosity, cultural awareness, and commitment to literature and community. The ten stories collected here are presented in the order they were announced as winners, in addition to short biographical notes about each writer arranged alphabetically at the back of the book.
What the Body Knows
After our argument, my beloved fled to the flea market. Upon returning, she said, “I still love you. Here’s a door.” Picture a storm door, heavy gauge aluminum, shrunk to 28 by 22 inches and attached to a frame—what she offered in lieu of a make-up kiss . . . . A shower is a door between clean and cleaner. Belief is a door you lay down in a graveyard whereby dead aunts climb out of the dirt. A bed at midday is a door between two people who touch and trade breaths and burn late and exit their bodies like vapor . . . . A cat is a door we keep around the house to remind us we once preferred the world of animals. Morning has come. My door, which is now our door, leans against the wall the way shadows lean into the next life. My cat passes through this practice portal to prove she is still here. I get down on all fours, a rehearsal. I have doors all over my body—open them.
—From “Doors” by Lance Larsen, in What the Body Knows
Lance Larsen’s poetry inhabits a surreal backyard, blooming with zucchini, peonies, hooves and bones, sheet music by Chopin, and God the Father, loping through a vineyard. In 2012, Larsen was named the Utah Poet Laureate, a post he describes as “a kind of itinerant preacher of the word (lower case), or a Johnny Appleseed of the literary artifact.” Fortunately, he has a gift for making words grow. His poems often begin with quick affirmatives (“True…. yes”), as if they first sprouted in casual back-porch conversations and then wheeled off into their own expanding lives. . . . There’s a slantwise echo of the garden in all of Larsen’s poetry. In its fascination with the natural world, both domestic and wild, there’s a longing to connect with the creation, with the other, and with God.
Buddha’s Dog
Ira Sukrungruang’s Buddha’s Dog & Other Meditations charts one man’s journey toward emotional maturity, to a place of knowledge though not necessarily of comfort. These marvelous essays weather with heart and humor the tumultuous waters of cultural identity, body image, and mortality, to arrive at those bittersweet truths about our flawed yet spirited selves.
– Rigoberto González
Author of Autobiography of My Hungers
Subversive, sorrowful, tender, and sly, Buddha’s Dog & other Meditations is Ira Sukrungruang’s best book yet: a love song to bodies, both canine and human, imperfect and hungry to live.
– Paul Lisicky
Author of The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship
Studies in the Fantastic [#5]
The Quest for Female Empowerment in William Morris’s Late Prose Romances
By Weronika Łaszkiewicz
Bad Future: Real-Time Alternate History
By Andrew Frost
Love in the Time of the Zombie Contagion: A Girardian-Weilienne Reading of World War Z
By Duncan Reyburn
The Figure of the Gothic Body in the Fiction of Caitlín R. Kiernan
By James Goho
Public Land
“The portraits, elegies, and landscapes in Public Land illuminate these pages with flashes of shadow and uncharted landscapes of electric, existential honesty. In tensile and subtle verse, Matt Sumpter deftly embraces the rhythms of language and emotional experience, gifting us a poetry that, like the forests our speaker turns and returns to, harbors the most ineffable of growth. This book is unflinchingly, deeply felt. It builds and changes under its own light like a flowering engine, ‘as if this ruin were a kind of rescue.’ This is vital, arresting work by a singular voice, and I know that I will turn and return to these poems in years to come.”
— Lo Kwa Mei-en
Light into Bodies
Taken as a whole, Light into Bodies grapples with issues of identity, the fluid and evolving nature of identity, and how identity can be contextual. It explores individual identity and how that identity changes through time and influence. The book is divided into three parts. The first section inhabits the landscape of childhood, that of a biracial, multiethnic child as she grapples with understanding the world and her place in it based on what she sees and what she’s been taught. The second section moves from childhood and family-of-origin into the world of the adult: relationships, marriage, divorce, and expectations of identity and behavior based on relationship roles. The third section opens up to the larger world and identity in that world, societal expectations and assumptions with respect to identity, the concept of home, memory and time, origins and creation. Recurring juxtapositions of sometimes seemingly disparate things, such as science and religion, myth and math, East and West, coupled with a mix of various poetic forms and styles, strive to work against the declaration of a monolithic identity. The book ends with a nod to the idea that we are multi-dimensional with multiple identities, to the idea that identity is a personal journey and that we have a right and an obligation to identify our own selves.
Love Nailed to the Doorpost
In Love Nailed to the Doorpost, Richard Chess offers poems and lyrical prose inspired and informed equally by the pleasures and pressures of everyday life and by sacred and secular texts ranging from Torah to Basho to Robert Creeley. This new work transports us from the biblical past to the present, from creation stories to stories of brotherly struggle to meditations on married and family love.
Love—that’s the thing, whether spontaneously arising or commanded, as it is, the commandment to love inscribed on parchment, rolled up and tucked into a small case, a mezuzah, and nailed to the doorpost of the house. You shall love: the challenges of fulfilling that commandment, and the joy and transformation one experiences when one does: that’s what Chess’s powerful new work explores.
Studies in the Fantastic [#4]
How to Build a Transsexual Superman: Reading Superman’s Emergence Alongside Histories of Eugenic Science and Gender Confirmation Surgeries
By Dan Vena
How to Hack Lovecraft, Make Friends with His Monsters, and Hijack His Mythos: Reading Biology and Racism in Elizabeth Bear’s ‘Shoggoths in Bloom’
By Anthony Camara
Ghana-da’s Tall-Telling: Reframing History, Estranging Science, and Appropriating Indigenous Structures of Feeling
By Anwesha Maity
‘The Icy Bleakness of Things’: The Aesthetics of Decay in Thomas Ligotti’s ‘The Bungalow House’
By Chris Brawley
The Expert Witness
With drawings by Jeanne Clark Meinke
This new collection of twenty-six stories includes eighteen hard-to-find gems and eight new tales from Flannery O’Connor Award Winner and Florida Poet Laureate Peter Meinke. Jeanne Clark Meinke has added two dozen new and selected drawings to form a collection sure to become a favorite.
O Fortunate Floridian
S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, the leading scholars of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s life and work, have assembled all of Lovecraft’s letters to his friend, Robert H. Barlow of DeLand, Florida, in this impressive volume. Though the two corresponded for only seven years, Lovecraft’s side of the exchange totals nearly 500 pages. The editors have annotated the letters exhaustively, clarifying hundreds of references to people, places, literary works, and history. Their long introduction provides the reader with the essential story of the friendship between Lovecraft and Barlow, and their relationships with friends and colleagues in the worlds of amateur journalism, fandom, pulp fiction, and others.
“What a book! As a young fan first acquiring works by Lovecraft in the 1960s I never dreamed that any such volume would or could be published. You can largely step into the shoes of Robert Hayward Barlow, if you wish, when you read this book. What a privilege!” – Kenneth W. Faig Jr. (The Fossil, January 2008)
Separate Flights
Winner of the 2015 Anita Claire Scharf Award
Many of the poems in Separate Flights are about perspective: a child’s view of her neighborhood from the shifting altitudes of a small plane, the dying Keats looking out his window at life going on without him, a deadly hot air balloon crash that appears beautiful to a passenger flying far above it, Monet in his garden continuing to paint the willows within earshot of the German guns. In these poems birds appear both as part of nature and as messengers: the heron flying over a sick woman’s house, the goldfinch arriving as unexpectedly as an idea, the owl nesting in winter and calling forth spring. Whether their focus is nature or human consciousness, the poems in Separate Flights pay attention to the ways in which angle of vision alters our perceptions of the world.
Black Anthem
This book of sonnets—wide-ranging in their investigations of the body, the psyche, metaphysical hunger and its place in human conflict—owes its emotional power to the speed and focus of small songs taking part in a larger conversation. In honor and defiance of tradition, these sonnets turn their gaze outward to ask, is not a song more elusive than our story about it? How might our limits quicken and deepen the question of values? Whatever the anthem, as Bond explores it, something of its music is ever larger than its message, its measures more measureless, its window more capacious than its frame. Paisley Rekdal, author of Animal Eye, says, “Black Anthem is beautiful, smart, and relentlessly probing. Anyone interested in the sonnet tradition must read it.”
Studies in the Fantastic [#3]
With this third issue, Studies in the Fantastic welcomes readers to a reboot and revival of the journal. In the five years since the last issue, many new and exciting trends have arisen in popular culture and scholarship; in the box office, superheroes dominate, and popular franchises—including Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Terminator, and Mad Max—are having “reboots” of their own, Game of Thrones has renewed a popular interest in fantasy, and scholarship on popular culture proliferates in venues large and small
Studies in the Fantastic [#3] focuses on reboots, in keeping with a compelling contemporary trend and our own re-launch of the journal. Contributors to the issue tackle issues of adaptation, appropriation, and translation. That these topics are at the heart of current debates in literary and cultural studies speaks to the relevance of the fantastic to critical discourse; that this collection of essays is so diverse speaks to the breadth of scholarly approaches to the fantastic and gives great hope for the future of this field of study.
“The Terror of Translation: Ruins of the Translatio in The Castle of Otranto and Vathek”
by Micheal Angelo Rumore
“Revolutionary Subjectivity in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn Trilogy”
by Peter Melville
“Rebooting the Damsel: The Transformation of the Damsel Archetype in Spider-Man, Superman, and Batman Films from 1978-2014”
by Joseph Walderzak
“The Emerge(d)nt Weird Tale: A Genre Study”
by Todd Spaulding
The Rich Mouse Compendium
The Rich Mouse Compendium includes a complete facsimile of the hand-printed letterpress edition; an introduction; complete facsimiles of two versions of J. J. Lankes’ original manuscript (one typed and one hand-written); notes on the discovery of those manuscripts; original, unpublished photographs and background materials on J. J. Lankes as artist and printer; photographs and background materials on Frederic W. Goudy and his design of the Village type; a J. J. Lankes chronology; and notes and essays on the making of the letterpress edition.
Set in a new digital version of Goudy’s Village type (the typeface used for printing the letterpress edition), it includes an introduction by Welford D. Taylor; essays by Richard Mathews, Robert Oldham, Will Ransom, and Joshua G. Steward; and a conversation with Parker Agelasto.
Tampa Review 50
This year Tampa Review celebrates its fiftieth anniversary with this second of two anniversary issues. From a tiny seed, a surprising family tree has grown: from the mimeographed and stapled UT Poetry Review to today’s lithographed Tampa Review, printed in signatures and sewn into hardback covers. Rooted in the literary and artistic community of the Tampa Bay area, we have grown to be Florida’s oldest literary journal, in this issue renewing itself in partnership with one of the area’s newest cultural assets, the Two Red Roses Foundation.
We are proud of our traditions and our strong affinities with the American Arts and Crafts Movement. Its authentic spirit guides us as an independent, nonprofit publisher, dedicated to artistic standards rather than commercial values. In step with the Two Red Roses Foundation and its Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, we rededicate ourselves to strive for and represent the highest aims of visual and literary arts and to practice in our craft the tangible ways of bringing these aims into daily relevance within the world.
Like the Arts and Crafts Movement that blurred and blended lines between decoration and utility, the literary texts in this issue explore a series of contrasts and connections—past/future, parent/child (especially father/son), poverty/wealth, cynicism/idealism—while refusing to treat them as binaries. The narrator of Isabella David’s Danahy Fiction Prize story is a young law student determined to reject simple dualisms, yet unable to abandon the lure of finely parsed sentences and legal profits for the indistinct goals of fine art. In “Greenhouse Statistics,” Poet Laureate of Florida Peter Meinke acknowledges the contradictions behind his decision to teach his children the ironically named survival skill of “the dead man’s float.”
Children represent the future, and their stories are more complicated than simple fairy tales, as we are reminded in “The Feral Children of Kabul” by J. Malcolm Garcia and in the deconstructed plot of “Hansel and Gretel” by D. J. Sheskin, in which a word game played by grown-ups adds ominous readings to a familiar text. Craig Cotter’s “Nickle Diner” shows a more ideal human moment—a welcome escape from loneliness through empathy and poetry. Together the contents of this fiftieth-anniversary issue transmit rich complexity. As Meinke suggests, while statistics prove the dangers of climate change and measure the threat of global war, we workers in arts and crafts must go on repairing and decorating our houses, teaching and cherishing our children—accepting the limited extent of our power, but nonetheless using it. The beautiful and useful! As Steve Kowit exhorts in his final poem: “Cherish! Cherish! That’s all I can tell you.”
Cherish
How strange to be here at all
talking to you like this in a poem—
if only a moment our two psyches
touching.
—from “Passing Thru”
Steve Kowit’s poetry has been described as a “memorable exhilaration, a singular concentration of language, and a flow of razor-sharp images springing irrepressibly from the author’s humanity” (CHOICE). It is his humanity we celebrate in this, Steve’s last collection. Cherish: New and Selected Poems was receiving its final editorial touches by Steve when he passed away in April of 2015.
Steve Kowit—a poet, an editor, a teacher—was 2007 winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for his collection The First Noble Truth and author of other books of poems, including Lurid Confessions, The Dumbbell Nebula, and The Gods of Rapture. He was also author of the influential creative writing workshop text In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop.
“How fine to have in in our hands . . . the lucid, voluptuous, exuberant poems of Steve Kowit.” —Dorianne Laux
Southside Buddhist
Carrying forward the themes and spirit of his previous memoir, Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy, and his book of poems, In Thailand It Is Night, Ira Sukrungruang brings humor, insight, and lyricism to his new collection of personal essays, Southside Buddhist. Here he cruises Chicago streets, treks Southern Illinois forests, wrestles with his ever-expanding body, and contemplates the complexities of the Thai immigrant life. He finds solace with his imaginary friend, Buddha; causes mischief with the boys in his working-class neighborhood; battles depression and suicide; and marries “the whitest woman in the world,” who teaches him to appreciate a world blessed by the absence of concrete, skyscrapers, and noise. This book searches for the truth of his memories, the truth of himself—a very Buddhist notion—while navigating the tricky terrains of urban and rural life with increasing awareness of what it means to be an immigrant son.
Tampa Review 49
We are pleased to begin our fiftieth year by featuring selections from My Generation: Young Chinese Artists, an exhibition showcasing some of the new world-class artists who have emerged in China since 2000. This exhibition—a collaboration between the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, and the Tampa Museum of Art— offers stunning visual evidence that Florida is fully engaged in global cultural dialog. The show runs here June 7-September 28, 2014, before traveling to Oklahoma City Museum of Art, where it will be on view October 25, 2014-January 18, 2015. The works speak for themselves while bridging the country and spanning the globe.
The literary contents of TR49 reflect a new generation’s struggle with “Utopia”—as Qui Xiaofei visually depicts on the cover. Poet Zeina Hashem Beck also expresses it in her opening poem as she personifies a world “trying to tip over its pain.” Daniel Gabriel describes a utopian interlude in his 2009 visit to “Syria Before It All Went South.” By contrast, Malcolm Garcia struggles to find grounds for faith amidst horror and ruin in “Praying in Reyhanli.”
Less destructive but deeply troubling is the singing war started by Mrs. Mudd in Jill Birdsall’s “The Beer Garden,” where experiences that promise harmony become discordant when inflected by greed, ego, and nationalism. Poet Michael Hettich takes a higher view in “Certain Constellations,” in which attentiveness to the natural world affirms the possibility of harmony if “we might move into/the circle of its song.”
The issue concludes with struggles from our more recent past portrayed in Vincent Czyz’s “Straightsville,” set in the 1980s, mostly at a gay rally in Manhattan. The story’s narrator experiences a series of mutual misreadings that blur the cultural divide between New York and New Jersey, gay and straight, work week and weekend. Czyz’s story suggests, as does the speaker of Knute Skinner ’s poem “What I Have Assembled,” that selves are multiple, that they can be torn apart and reassembled in diverse ways, and that people and generations may be more alike than different.
Finally, reproductions from the Tampa Poetry Review of fifty years ago remind us how both our distant and recent pasts contain the cultural heritage and visionary struggles that create each new version of “my generation.”
Sixty Years of Prints & Wood Engravings
Wood engraving and letterpress printing have proven to be more than passing hobbies for Spokane, Washington artist and craftsman Gale Mueller. Sixty Years of Prints & Wood Engravings collects the evidence to show what a substantial body of work can result from an activity one does for love rather than money. From early prints for Christmas cards in 1953 through the accomplished “Armadillo” wood engraving in 2013, Mueller’s touch conveys delight and insight in the scores of images he has rendered over a lifetime of work—work that continues on for this publication: a new cut, of “The Engraver” himself, was designed, engraved, and printed by the artist especially for this collection. Sixty Years of Prints & Wood Engravings reproduces over 125 prints, including 24 color reproductions of multicolor relief prints, with a Foreword by woodcut collector and J. J. Lankes scholar Welford D. Taylor; Afterword by letterpress printer Mike O’Conner.
“There is a distinctly personal dimension . . . at times humorous, occasionally whimsical but never inappropriate or gratuitous. It is his manner to observe the telling qualities of a subject, respect its uniqueness as he expresses it and then, often but not always, embellish it with a touch of his own unique essence . . . His work indicates that a human hand, guided by a human heart, has carved the design.” —from the Foreword, by Welford D. Taylor
Also available in a hand bound, limited edition that includes a signed frontispiece of “The Engraver” printed by the artist from the original block.
Tampa Review 47/48
Every work of literary and visual art can be said to offer an experience of “augmented reality,” making us aware of hidden dimensions, perceptions, and truths about our world that heighten and enhance our understanding. This issue of Tampa Review, however, presents Augmented Reality for the first time in a digital mode. The cover art by Kendra Frorup includes a gateway to a virtual reality, and readers with the Aurasma app on an iPhone, iPad, or smart device can view the emptiness within that arch as a threshhold to moving images from Turks and Caicos in the Bahamas.
Augmented Reality is only one of many “firsts” in this double issue. It’s also the first time that we have highlighted our own University of Tampa art faculty as the featured artists for the issue. We don’t know why we didn’t think of it before, but now that it has finally occurred to us, it will not be the last time. It has always been part of our mission to connect Florida and the world, and our University of Tampa art faculty beautifully fit the pattern of local and global awareness.
One phrase that comes to mind with respect to the contents is “foreign and domestic,” a term pointing two ways that turns up in federal swearing-in ceremonies and in oaths of citizenship. It also resonates throughout this issue, from the homeland security of “A Family of Interest” in James Gordon Bennett’s Danahy Fiction Prize story to Martin Cloutier’s disturbing “World Brought Close,” with its images of need and vulnerability. Foreign and domestic explorations can stretch the boundaries of the worlds we know, and this issue probes both home and outer limits. Reality is continuously augmented in this issue, cover to cover, rolling out in unexpected directions and connections near and far—spokes on a wheel, cords and ties that bind, new ways of reading that open the doors of perception.
Visitations
Winner of the Anita Claire Scharf Award
Robert Morgan describes John Bensko’s collection, Visitations, as “a book of portraits and voices, many voices, all of them vivid and memorable. Rivers speak, weeds speak, and figures from American history tell us their stories . . . Both the atrocities and glories of our world come to life in these poems of witness, lament, celebration, and the often painful mystery of love.”
In Visitations, Bensko pushes readers to enlarge their vision through imaginative leaps; his poems are visitations to multiple times and places, indwelling bodies and circumstances. He allows us to inhabit both sides of a war, to move from the Hudson River Valley to Mississippi, or to draw our souls through sheep, oxen, and shark; we are unmoored from time and place to explore what it means to be fully human.
“I sit back after reading one of these and have to catch my breath, a little shaken by encountering a poet whose instinct guides him straight to the heart of the matter . . . I rejoice that poetry this good is still being written,” writes Richard Tillinghast.
Systems of Vanishing
Winner of the 2013 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry
Though the poems in Systems of Vanishing range widely in their content and form, the collection as a whole is grounded in its focus on the disappearances occurring all around us, all the time. Some of these disappearances are natural, organic vanishings that have always been central to life; others are unnatural, grief-inducing losses we are inflicting on the world—the vanishing of species, of beauties of all kinds, and of the rhythms by which we live most fully, replaced by noise and a lust for things. But Hettich’s poems are also infused with a profound gratitude for the pleasures and graces of his life—the amazing natural fecundity that surrounds him in his subtropical habitat, and the abiding love of family and friends. These poems explore not only the extraordinary variety and magnitude of loss, but also the great power of resilience and joy.
Chase Twitchell says of Hettich and Systems of Vanishing, “(His) authority, which is both modest and absolutely genuine, compels us to follow him into some wild what-ifs, which make for an exciting ride. His elegy for a lost daughter brought me to tears. The quiet magic of these poems is stunning and profound.”
Richard Blanco calls Systems of Vanishing Hettich’s “most profound and intricate collection to date.”
Truth and Affection
Jeanne Clark Meinke is an artist with drawings in The New Yorker, Gourmet, Yankee, numerous other periodicals, and in her book Lines from Wildwood Lane. Peter Meinke is an author whose work has been published in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, Tampa Review, seven books of the Pitt Poetry Series, and in two collections of fiction. He is Poet Laureate of St. Petersburg, Florida. Together they deliver Truth and Affection in the “Poet’s Notebook” columns that have appeared in Creative Loafing over a period of more than six years. As David Warner writes in his foreword, it “is difficult to define, a tasty bouillabaisse of poetry, politics, and personal essay . . . winning hearts and minds of all ages . . . and a few awards along the way.”
Absence & Presence
In her ninth book, and her second poetry collection with the University of Tampa Press, Lisa Steinman considers both the seen and the unseen as she “meditatively engages the ironies of being,” as poet Maxine Scates has beautifully phrased it. Writer Alice Fulton observes that “In Absence & Presence, Lisa M. Steinman confronts the most unsparing aspects of existence with an intelligence that is nothing short of revelatory.”
Dear Stranger
Poet Major Jackson refers to the poems in Jenny Browne’s newest collection as “angel-fisted lyrics,” and this evocative phrase captures both the tough and rapturous sides of her work. With poems of memory and narrative, thought and feeling, Jenny Browne has shaped another powerful book.
Poet and professor Stephen Burt of Harvard University writes, “Her poems retain the unpredictability not of a roulette wheel or a supernova, but of a quirky, wise friend in another city, one whose reactions surprise us even once we know her well enough to trust her well.”
Tampa Review 45/46
Issue 45/46 of Tampa Review features the 2012 winner of the $1,000 Danahy Fiction Prize, “Scar” by Mark Krieger. The cover art is a photograph of the expansive room-sized installation art of Carol Mickett and Robert Stackhouse exhibited in the Selby Gallery of the Ringling College of Art and Design of Sarasota, Florida. Like their installations, much of the work in this issue explores phases of identity, considers the marks we leave upon the world and questions permanence and change. Readers are invited to consider how experiences scar us, and to ask how permanent those marks may be.
The new double issue contains the work of twenty-eight poets, twelve works of art by painters, photographers, found-object sculptors, installation and mixed media artists, as well as six written works each in fiction and nonfiction categories.
In Thailand it is Night
Winner of the Anita Claire Scharf Award
In Thailand It Is Night reminds us that poetry holds both nostalgia and instructions: we dream of the future while wearing the garments of our fathers. Ira Sukrungruang’s new collection is surprising and clear at every turn. –Stephen Kuusisto
In Ira Sukrungruang’s In Thailand It Is Night, the afterlife is where the streets bustle with the sounds of a backfiring motor and where the surprise of peacocks in the middle of the city fan out their blues and greens despite the strangeness of the paved walkways. Within, Midwest winters are warded off by palpable memories of home while the complexities of love and the world are recollections blossoming from the mind as dogs howl “at the bitten moon.” A vast statue of Buddha houses wintering birds in its ears. Their songs are Sukrunguang’s poems which travel the curved path from the brain into the heart. –Oliver de la Paz
To read the poems in In Thailand It Is Night is to encounter a speaker who knows that poetry lies deeply embedded in the body, and in the litany of breath itself. Sukrungruang has limned an extraordinary collection couched in the broken language of immigration and the mystical language of reincarnation, a book that is as dreamy as it is resolute. Deeply rooted in the landscape, these poems define emotion using the riches of the natural world: finches and cranes and crows, geckos and tree frogs and cardinals and moths—these creatures weave longing, memory, and family into an intricate, lyric-narrative web. “My palms are up,” writes Sukrungruang, and this gesture signifies how open his poetry is to the world, to the simultaneous beauty and suffering it brings.” –Erika Meitner
The Old Dominion
Winner of the 2012 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry
Jennifer Key takes the title of her first book of poetry from the nickname for the state of Virginia, but she extends the evocative phrase to reflect her complex understanding of domination and dominion in a multi-layered cultural context. The Old Dominion speaks to us with exceptional, insistent images and ideas. Her poems develop into intricate thematic relationships in a gorgeous collection.
Genius Loci
“Lance Larsen’s fourth collection of poems is as beautifully curated as an art exhibition. Each poem impresses itself of mind and eye and heart like an object brilliantly made and suddenly essential, suddenly neccessary. Wry wit, perfectly etched lines, and a talent for finding poems in unexpected places are hallmarks. His is an important, clarifying voice that you don’t want to miss.” –Kelly Cherry, author of The Retreats of Thought: Poems
“These small, smart treasures dazzle us every time. Deceptively simple observational moments offer themselves up with such inviting clarity that we are, to our benefit, startled by a world turned around in the hand—‘An elevator waiting to be translated into a school bus,’ for example. The poems live their bigger stories to be sure, but imaginative, quiet epiphanies make them feel surprising at every turn.” –Alberto Ríos, author of The Dangerous Shirt
Tampa Review 43/44
From a timeless Magic Carpet interview with featured cover artist Robert Zakanitch, to the search for roots in Colin Chad Redemer’s “Buried,” to the domestic epic quest of Rebecca Huntman’s “The Dining Room Table,” this latest release touches on mystery, pattern, and culture. Presented by a cast of 70 poets, artists, writers, and editors, this Fall/Winter 2012 double issue of Tampa Review is magic and mythic.
The Occasions of Paradise
Winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry.
John Blair’s previous poetry collection, The Green Girls, was the 2003 winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Award from Pleiades Press, and his short story collection, American Standard, was the 2002 winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. He also has two novels from Ballantine/Del Rey, Bright Angel and A Landscape of Darkness, and has poems and stories in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, The Sewanee Review, The Antioch Review, New Letters, and elsewhere. Kevin Prufer writes, “Blair’s poems are musically brilliant, ambitious, and full of gentle urgency. And, despite their sadness and pain, they are also quietly optimistic and elegant.”
The Shape of Poetry
With drawings by Jeanne Clark Meinke
Peter Meinke is the author of fifteen books of poetry, seven of them in the prestigious Pitt Poetry Series. This book, with drawings by Jeanne Clark Meinke, introduces writers and readers alike to the art and craft of the contemporary poem. The reviewer for The Tampa Tribune describes it well: “This book is so unpretentiously written, so clear in its purpose, and so generously illustrated with poetic selections that it is a delight to read. Anyone, poetic or not, can learn a lot effortlessly in the hands of this gifted teacher and poet.”
Caladesi Cookbook
Compiled by Myrtle Scharrer Betz’s granddaughters Terry Fortner and Suzanne Thorp
“Caladesi Cookbook: Recipes from a Florida Lifetime is pure delight. More than simply a good cookbook, it is a touching story of a lost and vanishing Florida—Myrtle’s granddaughters, Terry Fortner and Suzanne Thorp, have lovingly compiled not simply the recipes, but the memories and stories that make Caladesi Cookbook: Recipes from a Florida Lifetime a culinary and historic treasure.” – from the foreword by Gary Mormino
The Light in the Film
Drawing on characters from Tosca to Lew Welch to Henry Purcell and on landscapes from Mexico to Hell to Saratoga Springs, Jordan Smith’s sixth collection of poems is a wide-ranging consideration of the world viewed in the light of loss and restitution. Smith’s lyrics look for likenesses found in the combination of the unlikely, and they discover, in the do-it-yourself culture of America, a determined, eccentric resistance to time’s erosions. Adrian Frazier of the National University of Ireland said of this collection: “You won’t find any better wisdom, or memorable music, in the back catalogues of your favourite songbooks. For my money, then, Jordan Smith’s The Light in the Film is great poetry.”
Rip-Tooth
Winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry
“Devoted as a hawk and just that acutely aware, in Rip-Tooth Dennis Hinrichsen targets his subjects for soulful sustenance, and with every searing line chooses clarity over insanity: in the perceptual realm, in nature, in family, in all the tough brainless inheritances a human poetry must bear up and under and forward. For their exceptional grace and dignity, these poems can be read with sheer gratitude.”—William Olsen
Zephyrhills from A to Z
Zephyrhills has a rich history that is full of surprising facts and engaging anecdotes. The story of its people and what they have achieved is told here in a collection of articles arranged from A to Z, spanning more than a hundred years of dynamic change in the Sunshine State.
Read about the city’s earliest days in the late 1800s when it was known as Abbott; its settlement by Civil War veterans; the pioneer citizens who found happiness around idyllic Zephyr Lake; the successes and trials of the entrepreneurs who sought their fortunes in endeavors as diverse as manufacturing, the lumber industry, and roadside attractions. Follow the story from A to Z — from Abbott to Zephyrhills — and discover how a whistle-stop dot on the map grew into the charming “City of Pure Water,” whose name has become synonymous with the country’s best spring water.
The book is generously illustrated with nearly 100 photographs and other images.
Willis T. Crossman’s Vermont: Stories by W. Paul Cook
Edited with an introduction by Sean Donnelly and Leland M. Hawes Jr.
This appealing collection of wise and humorous stories by W. Paul Cook (1880-1948) is set in the author’s native state of Vermont. Written under the pen name Willis T. Crossman, the stories first appeared in the 1930s and 1940s in newspapers, literary magazines, and a dozen books and booklets printed in very small numbers. Their limited circulation all but destined the stories to be lost and forgotten. But throughout his life, Cook showed little inclination to profit from what he wrote and published.
The Crossman books and pamphlets, set in type and printed by his own hands, impress one, above all else, as labors of love. Years earlier he’d published a magazine with the revealing motto: “For Love Only. Not for Sale.” That principle guided much of what he did throughout a long career as a professional and amateur printer. Love is evident in these stories and in the original printed items themselves: love of his native Vermont’s history, her land, and especially her people.
The afterword is by Welford D. Taylor, who taught American literature for forty years at The University of Richmond, retiring in 2004 as James A. Bostwick Professor of English, Emeritus. The cover of the book is illustrated with “Wall’s House” by J. J. Lankes, a woodcut inspired by one of the artist’s sojourns in New England while collaborating with Robert Frost.
Whore
Winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry
This first book by Sarah Maclay captures intimations of love both fleeting and mysterious in poems of longing, rapture, heart-wreck, and self-confrontation. The judges praised her poems as “spectacular in their execution” and in their “hunger for unexpected disclosures.” William Olsen writes, “The poems in Sarah Maclay’s astonishing book insist on life, line by line, phrase by phrase.” Mary Ruefle describes them as “elegant, evocative poems, delivered in the lower register, rich and dense with drunken language.” And Roger Weingarten concludes “Maclay’s Whore is a street-smart Frank O’Hara Lazarused to L.A. with an ear for random possibilities, telling and sensuously imagine detail.”
White Shirt
White Shirt is the latest book of poetry from Christopher Buckley, whose work has been described by Emilia Philips in James Dickey Review as about “the crafts not only of poetry, but of memory, politics, philosophy, and probability, that present the whole of one man’s experience, of his time, including his losses and lost bets.”
Buckley, winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for Rolling the Bones, has been a vital and compelling voice in American poetry for three decades. Philip Levine, writing in Ploughshares, describes his poems as “modest, straightforward, intensely lyrical, and totally accessible . . . This is a humble poetry of great truths and profound emotions that never overstates its concerns for the events both in and above the world.”
Where Garagiola Waits
“Imagine a game where dreams wait on deck and your fantasy can drive in the winning run. Rick Wilber . . . captures both the sadness and sweetness of baseball and recreates its astonishing capacity to touch our lives. Give this book to the fan you love!” –James Patrick Kelly, Hugo-winning author
Tolbert Lanston and the Monotype – Trade Edition
Tolbert Lanston and the Monotype is printed in full color, with more than three hundred photos and illustrations, 232 pages, plus several appendices and index.
Learn the untold story of digital typesetting.
Tolbert Lanston, at the end of the nineteenth century, was a man obsessed with the idea of creating a machine which would provide automated typesetting yet preserve all the nuances of excellence in typography and fine printing. This also is the story of the man and the company that created and manufactured Monotypes for three-quarters of a century.
An American Civil War veteran, Lanston has remained a poorly documented hero of the typographic revolution. His Monotype System was the very first digital concept put into daily use in typesetting plants across the globe. The Monotype was a groundbreaking precursor to the computer revolution in the typesetting industry, though it was introduced over seventy years before computerized typesetting systems were developed.
This is the Hardback Trade Edition of Tolbert Lanston and the Monotype. Also available is the Hardback Limited-Edition.
This Miserable Pride of a Soldier
The Letters and Journals of Col. William S. Foster in the Second Seminole War, 1836-1839
Col. William S. Foster arrived in Florida after the commencement of the Second Seminole War and served under such famous generals as Edmund Gaines, Thomas Jesup, and Zachary Taylor. Using recently discovered letters and journals of Colonel Foster, John and Mary Lou Missal have brought to life an important chapter in the history of the nation’s longest, costliest, and deadliest Indian war.
This Disease
Writer Maureen Seaton beautifully describes the latest book by Chicago poet Barry Silesky: “Heartbreaking and heart-healing, terrifyingly sad and gorgeous in its exuberance, This Disease wrestles the hard stuff and brings us home to ‘Music and wine, and the blue, blue lake spreading into the sky—simply nothing to hate’—and much to love.”
Third Temple
“Playful and erudite, irreverent and prayerful, Rick Chess’s new poems speak to post-modern exile, taking up the timeless Jewish themes of freedom and slavery. Read Third Temple for its rich musicality and wise meditations on gender, politics, and the requirements of the moral life.” -Robin Becker
The White Bride
A book of delirious surfaces riding on obsessive rhythms and a long breath, Sarah Maclay’s second full-length collection, almost entirely prose poems, is composed of sentences as serpentine and sinuous as they are prone to interruption from the fragmented consciousness of inner and external worlds. Inspired by everything from old record covers to mannequins, historical figures, street scenes, music and myth, these dreamlike and inventive poems both extend and echo the sounds and sensibilities of her earlier work.
The Toxic Wave & The Dressing Room
These two original plays by Tampa playwright Susan Hussey address important contemporary issues of chemical pollution, AIDS, cancer, identity, and activism. Howard Zinn writes that “both plays shared a powerful social conscience” and adds that “they should be seen and heard by lots of people.”
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is H. P. Lovecraft’s longest and most personal work of fiction. This edition provides a definitive text, edited with an afterword and notes by the acclaimed Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi. It includes a special photographic section on “Lovecraft’s Providence” featuring the photographs of Donovan K. Loucks.
Special Hardback Edition now out of print
The Second Reason
Writer Nick Flynn says this book “is wild and beautiful and surprising. In this poet’s hands the seemingly mundane is transformed into the nearly sacred, the elemental reveals its inner mysteries, and scraps of overheard language dissolve into a song. Jenny Browne is a poet of alchemy, and these poems embody wonder.”
The Rich Mouse • Limited Edition Set
The Rich Mouse limited-edition set is comprised of two volumes, housed together in a handmade slipcase. The first volume is a hand-printed, hand-bound letterpress book that is the first edition of the “The Rich Mouse,” a beast fable featuring two mice as protagonists, written in 1950 by the renowned American woodcut artist J. J. Lankes, who also created two woodcuts to accompany his story. In the letterpress edition we reproduce those two original illustrations for the first time and supplement them with several other complementary and seldom-seen Lankes woodcuts. The book was printed on the 1848 iron hand press once owned by Lankes on fine mouldmade Somerset paper, with handset foundry types designed by Frederic W. Goudy, and hand-bound in hardcover using decorative wood-patterned papers inspired by the Lankes woodcuts, and specifically made for this project.
The letterpress edition is accompanied by “The Rich Mouse Compendium,” a paperback companion volume created to accompany the letterpress book. Set in a new digital version of Goudy’s Village type (the typeface used for printing the letterpress edition), in a paperback binding matching the letterpress hand-bound edition, it includes a full facsimile of the letterpress edition of “The Rich Mouse,” together with an introduction, notes on the manuscript, facsimile manuscript pages, original photographs and background materials on J. J. Lankes as artist and printer, photographs and background materials on Frederic Goudy and his design of the Village type, a J. J. Lankes chronology, and notes on the making of the letterpress edition.
Introduction by Welford D. Taylor; essays by Richard Mathews, Robert Oldham, Will Ransom, and Joshua G. Steward; and a conversation with Parker Agelasto.
The Rich Mouse first-edition set is limited to 150 numbered copies.
The Names of Things Are Leaving
Winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry
“Jordan Smith’s poems have the integrity of American oak and the systematic grace of music, which is their subject,” writes David Rigsbee. This is the latest collection by the poet who won the first Tampa Review Prize for Poetry with For Appearances. Of his new book, Karen Swenson says, “Smith makes stunning music, which draws you in to the dance.” John Drury adds, “The names of things may be leaving, but not if Jordan Smith’s marvelous, magnificent poems can help it.”
The Movie of Us
Kevin Jeffery Clarke’s poems have appeared in journals including Hudson Review and Paris Review, but he had not yet published his first book when he died suddenly in 2002 at the age of 48. Editor Don Morrill writes in his introduction that when friends brought the manuscript to his attention, “It was clear that The Movie of Us was a complete work of undeniable power, that deserved an audience at the first opportunity.” All royalties from sales go to the Kevin Jeffery Clarke Poetry Publication Fund at the University of Tampa Press to support the publication of other first books of poetry.
The Library Window
Edited with an Introduction, Afterword, and Notes by Elizabeth Winston
The University of Tampa Press is pleased to present an important and attractive new edition of a classic story by Margaret Oliphant, edited and introduced by Elizabeth Winston. It is the first volume of Insistent Visions, a series dedicated to republishing supernatural fiction, mysteries, science fiction, and adventure stories from the nineteenth century that deserve to be more widely known and appreciated.
The Last Rites Never Came
Memoirs of a University Presidency, 1958-1971
Dr. David Delo presents a vivid picture of the scope of problems and issues that a successful university president must address. These memoirs bring to life a man who did successfully encompass that full spectrum with intelligence, leadership, and grace.
The Florida War
This classic history of the Second Seminole War has been a rare collector’s item, and nearly impossible to find at any price. Now this affordable reproduction in a quality paperback edition from the Seminole Wars Historic Foundation adds a portrait of the author and a drawing of Fort King from his journal.
Dr. Joe Knetsch, Historian for the Florida Governor and Cabinet, writes: “The study of the Second Seminole War begins and ends with the writings of John T. Sprague. . . . It can truly be said that without this volume, any understanding of the Second Seminole War has no foundation. It is simply that essential.”
The First Noble Truth
Steve Kowit’s poetry is shamelessly accessible, written in something close to the real language that we speak. Yet in Kowit’s hands it is language that is both luminous and lyrical. His poems are sometimes hilariously funny, sometimes fiercely political, sometimes slyly anecdotal, and sometimes all these things at once. His latest book, winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, will confirm the observation of Thomas Lux that Kowit “has more energy, more passion, more fire, and more humor in his left little finger than most poets have in their whole bodies.”
The End of a Good Party
Jean Justice is a writer’s writer who enjoys a long-standing literary reputation among readers and fans who have followed her work for decades. Her stories have appeared in prestigious periodicals ranging from Esquire to The Antioch Review, The Yale Review, and The Oxford American, but this is her first book-length collection. Fellow writers are rejoicing. “The End of a Good Party is ambitious in terms of its artistry,” writes Elizabeth Evans. “As soon as I began to read, I felt grateful and thought, This is a voice that I have been waiting to hear.” Poet Robert Dana says, “These are stories you read with a catch in your throat.” And Richard Stern, recipient of the Medal of Merit for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, writes of these stories, “For this half century, I have wondered why a book of them has not appeared. Now, at last, the wondering can stop. The University of Tampa Press has done what could and should have been done this long while, and here are the wonderful and wonderfully varied stories, each one beautifully wrought and tempered by a narrative intelligence, humor, subtlety, and strength that are like no one else’s.”
The Elf Poem
This delightful guide to writing and reading poems will appeal to children of all ages with charming drawings by Jeanne Clark Meinke and wise and winking elfish verse by Florida’s Poet Laureate, Peter Meinke. As the Elf advises:
“ . . . when you write, write carefully,
With gaiety and grace,
For when you write a lovely poem
The world’s a better place.”
The Dead Hand and the Bride’s Chamber
The University of Tampa Press is pleased to publish two tales of the supernatural—“The Dead Hand” by Wilkie Collins and “The Bride’s Chamber” by Charles Dickens–as the fourth volume of Insistent Visions. The stories originally appeared as parts of The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices by Dickens and Collins (1857), a collaboration between two giants of nineteenth century literature, with the more famous of the two authors claiming the right to list his name first. The complete work is not often read today, but through Maria Bachman’s discerning presentation of this pair of intriguing stories—published together as stand-alone pieces for the first time here—we hope they will reach a new and wider audience.
The Caves of Death and Other Stories
Volume III in the Insistent Visions series is a collection of the supernatural and weird fiction of California author Gertrude Atherton (1857-1948). She was a best-selling and prolific writer with a long career, spanning the 1890s to the 1940s, who made occasional forays into the supernatural field. Those stories were published in several mixed collections during her lifetime. University of Tampa Press is proud to gather them together in this new edition, edited by scholar S. T. Joshi, who provides an introduction, afterword, and notes on the text.
Tekiah
“The overarching subject of Tekiah, Richard Chess’s marvelous first book of poems, is the privileged and oppressive legacy of religious and historical experience, of memory that burdens the present even as it helps to clarify it. In a remarkable idiom that is as unpredictable as it is just . . .Chess brings the lift and shine of lyric speech to bear upon the unredeemable disorders of contemporary life. Tekiah will amaze, challenge and console all those who seek in poetry the transfiguring articulation of our darkest problems.” –Alan Shapiro
Sweet Core Orchard
Winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and the 2010 Lambda Literary Award for Poetry.
Poet Benjamin S. Grossberg planted his own small orchard a few years ago near his home in Ohio and called it Sweet Core Orchard, a resonant name that became the title of his second book of poetry and winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. Tampa Review judges praised the book for its “compelling affirmation of the longer poem . . . brilliant lyrical and thematic arcs, rich use of archetype and symbol, and heartening honesty.” Poet and critic Edward Hirsch, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, describes it as “a brave, unabashed, at times theological, and utterly exuberant collection of poems. This book is a beautiful orchard, and there is a sweet wild energy at its core.”
Stein Mart
In 1905, Sam Stein, a young Jewish immigrant from Russia, arrived in New York with $43 in his pocket and dreams of building a better life. David J. Ginzl documents the history of a company that is also the story of a remarkable family and the business three generations built together, from an immigrant peddler working the Mississippi Delta to a national retail chain with corporate offices in Jacksonville, Florida. Reading the book, one realizes that the mythical Horatio Alger success story popularized in the nineteenth century was reenacted in real life by young immigrants and American dreamers well into the twentieth century.
Space Traveler
In Benjamin S. Grossberg’s third collection, he forges a new mythology, fresh and contemporary in voice and content, as he examines how we live today, seen through the eyes of another being. Playful, insightful, wide in their arc of associations, the poems of Space Traveler are spoken by an alien traveling from star to star, getting a chance to “observe up close” the variety of outer-space phenomena. Along the way, the space traveler launches into contemplation of the range of subjects that humans encounter—-desire, aging, love and separation, and often addressing us, humanity, directly. The space traveler is sometimes exultant, sometimes bereft, but always finds implicit parallels of language and image between his experience traveling alone through space, and our lives in a contemporary world and a contemporary America. But despite its contemporary observations, the space traveler is the natural heir to ancient Odysseus and his fellow seafarers. He, too, navigates a magical landscape in a long search for home.
Maggie Anderson states that, “this book clearly establishes Benjamin Grossberg as one of our most original and consistently interesting poets.”
Sir Emery Walker
Sir Emery Walker helped inspire the revival of fine letterpress printing and typography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. A friend and collaborator of William Morris, he facilitated the design and casting of the famous Kelmscott Press types, and later, with T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, established the Doves Press and produced its famous types. Walker also founded a photo-engraving company that was renowned for the quality of its work. This illustrated memoir by R.C.H. Briggs is a rich introduction and tribute to the many facets of Walker’s life and work. It has been edited with a foreword and notes by Richard Mathews. Royalties from its sales support the Emery Walker Trust.
Saturday Night in Baoding
Winner of the AWP Award for Nonfiction.
“Whether he’s writing about ballroom dancing or bicycles, sex or secrecy, the ‘New China’ or Chairman Mao—or even of his own desire to receive the attention of attractive Chinese women—Richard Terrill is the perfect guide to a misunderstood country and an uncertain time. In Saturday Night In Baoding, Terrill writes with intelligence, honesty, and empathy about the people he meets, the person he is, and the moment that was.” –Joe Mackall, Editor, River Teeth
Rolling the Bones
Winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry.
Christopher Buckley has been a vital and compelling voice in American Poetry for three decades. Philip Levine, writing in Ploughshares, describes his work as “modest, straightforward, intensely lyrical, and totally accessible. . . . This is a humble poetry of great truths and profound emotions that never overstates its concerns for the events both in and above the world.”
Real Women of Tampa and Hillsborough County
They created a civilized society long before Europeans arrived in the New World, helped establish Tampa as the nation’s cigar capital, led Florida’s first statewide suffrage movement, built ships during World War II, and pioneered movements in fields ranging from real estate development to social service that forged the community’s character. These are the Real Women whose lives and times author Doris Weatherford has collected for this comprehensive review of Tampa and Hillsborough County women from prehistory to the millennium.
This revised and updated edition, now for the first time in paperback, includes a new foreword by Pam Iorio, mayor of Tampa from 2003-2011, and a new afterword by historian Canter Brown, Jr., who offers a look at the decade since the original publication of the book in 2004.
Public Gestures
Matt Yurdana’s first book was named as a finalist in poetry for the Oregon Book Awards. It explores the stories, recollections, and half-truths that we stand by and rely upon. Poet Gary Snyder writes: “These highly intelligent poems—slightly daft, mildly sinister, subtly funny—push us to be ready for anything. Soulful, rational, unjudgmental, heartbreaking, and healing. A hugely refreshing book.” Andrew Hudgins says, “Few poets can equal his astute merging of music and meaning. Public Gestures speaks with an enthralling voice.” And Pattiann Rogers says, “This is a first book of rare originality and perception.”
Paris on the Flats
Robert Dana helped to see this collection of his prose works through the press shortly before his death in February 2010. It includes memories and anecdotes about the early years of the Iowa Writers’ Workshops and his recollections of visits with Robert Frost, Stephen Spender, Robert Lowell, and other friends and poets; reviews and reflections on contemporary poetry; essays on subjects ranging from the author’s life to his passion for books and fine printing; and three interviews with the author. The book is handsomely illustrated with color photographs.
None Can Have Richer Memories
Distinguished historian Canter Brown Jr., combines interviews and meticulous research to preserve and convey the rich history of Polk County, Florida, in the second half of the twentieth century. “Canter Brown’s prose crackles with pulsating human energy,” writes James M. Denham, Professor of History and Director of the Center for Florida History at Florida Southern College in Lakeland. “This excellent, well-written, comprehensive study of Polk County, Florida, will inform natives, newcomers, public policy makers, or anyone else who yearns to understand the bracing—and sometimes unsettling—changes in Florida’s central heart since the Great Depression.”
Music for the Black Room
Elemental, essential and urgent, Music for the Black Room is made vivid by poems that transport through means both spare—at times, nearly irreducible—and lush. As the world of the everyday edges into the nocturnal, quotidian moorings give way to the surreal. Mistakes of both action and perception—the siren call of delusion and dream—fuel the fabrication of a psychescape where one thing seems to be another, whether through metaphor or actual error—an inscape of wind, of snow and dirt, where sky looks like water, where water can flame into fire.
Ms. Yamada’s Toaster
The 2008 winner of the Danahy Fiction Prize from Tampa Review, “Ms. Yamada’s Toaster” has been published separately in this limited-edition paperback with charming drawings by Roberta Ann Busard, a Michigan artist whose work can be found in museums and private collections including the Anchorage Museum of Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Kelly Luce has published fiction in North American Review, The Gettysburg Review, Fourteen Hills, Nimrod, and other journals. Her awards include a fellowship to the MacDowell Colony, a residency at Devils Tower National Monument, and the Joseph Henry Jackson Award from Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. Originally from Chicago, she worked for two years in Japan. She now lives in the Santa Cruz mountains of California.
Midnight Son
“Timothy Kennedy’s photos lovingly capture the intimacy of those glorious days when concerts were still intimate, when there was a close connection between the performer and the audience. While the intimacy may be gone, happily Kennedy’s photos remain to remind us of how sweet it was.” Baron Wolman, first chief photographer, Rolling Stone.
This first edition is limited to 500 copies signed by the artist.
Manifest
Winner of the 2003 Pinter Review Prize for Drama. The playwright describes his moving Holocaust drama as a theatrical vaudeville. But it is much more. Francis Gillen, UT Dana Professor of English and editor of Pinter Review calls it “a brilliant play that leaves the reader with nothing so much as an appropriate silence, and emptiness, which is yet not without hope.” Richard Schechner of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and editor of TDR praises it as “an important play by a very bright new light in the American theatre.”
Madagascar
Winner of the Pinter Review Prize for Drama, Madagascar is the story of a mysterious disappearance that changes three lives forever. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee writes: “Madagascar is a subtle, beautifully written, sad, and disturbing play.” And Doug Wright, author of the Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning I Am My Own Wife says: “With gorgeously wrought, resonant prose, J. T. Rogers has fashioned a singular and haunting detective story; one which suggests that life’s greatest challenge isn’t merely solving mysteries. Rather, it is to live tolerably among them, in a world without definitive answers. Madagascar is a potent, lyrical play by a writer of considerable craft.”
Looking Backward to Nowhere
Looking Backward to Nowhere: Two Visions of Utopia presents the complete text of two 19th century utopian novels: Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy and News from Nowhere by William Morris. The two works offer a fascinating comparison not only because Bellamy speaks from an American perspective and Morris from a British context, but also because Morris wrote his novel as a direct response to Bellamy’s, so the plot and thematic contrasts abound. Short introductory comments by Richard Mathews are supplemented by a generous selection of excerpts from Thomas More’s Utopia, which help to place both texts within the Utopian tradition. This is a convenient text for courses in Utopian studies or imaginary worlds—or for creative thinking about how we might live a better life.
Lines From Wildwood Lane
Lines from Wildwood Lane, is a collection of drawings by Jeanne Clark Meinke. Her work has appeared in magazines and newspapers such as The New Yorker, Gourmet, Bon Appetite, The St. Petersburg Times, and Tampa Review, among others. Depicting connections between everyday people and objects, Meinke says, “I don’t go around looking for subjects to draw; they must say something to me, because I know them when I see them.”
The limited–edition hardback is hand bound with French marbled paper and green quarter-linen spine by David H. Barry at Griffin Bookbinding, St. Petersburg, Florida.
Lines From Neuchatel (Hardback)
With drawings by Jeanne Clark Meinke
[Note: This limited-edition hardback is now out of print. Please consider the paperback trade edition.]
Fine poetry and art improve with age. In celebration and in evidence of this, the University of Tampa Press presents this new edition of a treasured collection by Peter Meinke, first Poet Laureate of the City of St. Petersburg, Florida: the thirty-fifth anniversary edition of his internationally acclaimed and long out-of-print classic, Lines from Neuchâtel, featuring drawings by Jeanne Meinke.
With a dozen additional drawings by Jeanne, a new essay and six added poems by Peter, and a production that presents the text and art in a handsome special edition, Lines from Neuchâtel has been enriched in the fullness of time. First designed and printed by St. Petersburg’s Konglomerati Press in 1974, Lines from Neuchâtel brought Peter and Jeanne’s poems and drawings together in a memorable and groundbreaking volume. Shortly afterward, Peter would publish his first book in the Pitt Poetry Series and begin a publishing history marked by major awards and readings around the globe. Jeanne’s drawings would begin to appear in The New Yorker and Gourmet magazine as well as in national literary journals and books.Lines from Neuchâtel holds a special place in the work and experience of two of Florida’s most admired artists in our “State of the Arts.”
Also available as a trade paperback.
Lines From Neuchatel
Fine poetry and art improve with age. In celebration and in evidence of this, the University of Tampa Press presents this new edition of a treasured collection by Peter Meinke, first Poet Laureate of the City of St. Petersburg, Florida: the thirty-fifth anniversary edition of his internationally acclaimed and long out-of-print classic, Lines from Neuchâtel, featuring drawings by Jeanne Meinke.
With a dozen additional drawings by Jeanne, a new essay and six added poems by Peter, and a production that presents the text and art in a handsome special edition, Lines from Neuchâtel has been enriched in the fullness of time. First designed and printed by St. Petersburg’s Konglomerati Press in 1974, Lines from Neuchâtel brought Peter and Jeanne’s poems and drawings together in a memorable and groundbreaking volume. Shortly afterward, Peter would publish his first book in the Pitt Poetry Series and begin a publishing history marked by major awards and readings around the globe. Jeanne’s drawings would begin to appear in The New Yorker and Gourmet magazine as well as in national literary journals and books.Lines from Neuchâtel holds a special place in the work and experience of two of Florida’s most admired artists in our “State of the Arts.”
Also available as a handcrafted hardback bound by David Barry of Griffin Bindery, St. Petersburg, with dark blue quarter-linen spine and French marbled papers, signed by poet and artist.
Light Persists
Winner of the 2005 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry.
Through nature, Jane Ellen Glasser is put in touch with her inner world in the stillness of a meditation that delights and awakens. Yet she does not shun life’s difficulties. At the heart of this book are poems mourning her daughter Jessica, who died in a car accident at the age of twenty-two. Glasser courageously addresses loss and doubt as she leads us on an enlightening journey, wide enough to encompass gratitude and joy, blessed by images and language full of grace for eye and ear.
Lankes: His Woodcut Miniatures (Slipcase Only)
Slipcases for the Lankes: His Woodcut Miniatures, bound by hand by David Barry of Griffin Bindery. Covered in Japan mulberry paper purchased by J. J. Lankes for an unrealized project.
Available as either a Single-volume slipcase or a Double-volume slipcase to house both the Leather bound & Japanese Mulberry paper editions together in one case. When purchased we will communicate with you about your choice.
Lankes: His Woodcut Miniatures (Leather Binding)
Edition of 75 / Bound in leather
This deluxe, limited-edition miniature book has been set in metal type and hand printed letterpress on J. J. Lankes’s 1848 Hoe Washington Press at the Tampa Book Arts Studio. The text paper is Rives mouldmade paper from the Arches Mill in France. David H. Barry bound the books by hand at his Griffin Bindery. The book reproduces twelve remarkable miniature cuts, with an introduction by Welford D. Taylor and notes by Parker C. Agelasto.
Seventy-five copies, bound in full leather, are signed by Welford D. Taylor and Parker C. Agelasto.
There is also an board-bound edition, covered in Japanese mulberry paper, limited to 200 copies.
Slipcases made by David Barry are available for an additional $10.
Lankes: His Woodcut Miniatures
Edition of 200 / Bound in boards covered in Japan mulberry paper
This limited-edition miniature book has been set in metal type and hand printed letterpress on J. J. Lankes’s 1848 Hoe Washington Press at the Tampa Book Arts Studio. The text paper is Rives mouldmade paper from the Arches Mill in France. David H. Barry bound the books by hand at his Griffin Bindery.The book reproduces twelve remarkable miniature woodcuts, with an introduction by Welford D. Taylor and notes by Parker C. Agelasto.
Two hundred numbered copies are bound in boards covered in Japan mulberry paper purchased by Lankes for an unrealized project.
There is also a Deluxe edition, bound in full leather, limited to 75 copies.
Slipcases made by David Barry are available for an additional $10.
Insistent Visions (Four Volume Set)
Insistent Visions is a series dedicated to republishing supernatural fiction, mysteries, science fiction, and adventure stories from the nineteenth century that deserve to be more widely known and appreciated. As of Winter 2016/2017 the series is made up of four volumes:
The Library Window (94 pages)
A new edition of a classic story by Margaret Oliphant, edited and introduced by Elizabeth Winston.
A Study of Destiny (110 pages)
Count Louis Hamon—also known as Cheiro—was an Irishman who achieved international celebrity as a seer, palmist, numerologist, and bestselling author. A Study of Destiny (also published as The Hand of Fate) was his only work of fiction. This masterful story of a curse—and the fate of the cursed—has been out of print, except for one anthology appearance, since the 1890s.
The Caves of Death and Other Stories (107 pages)
A collection of the supernatural and weird fiction of California author Gertrude Atherton (1857-1948). She was a best-selling and prolific writer with a long career, spanning the 1890s to the 1940s, who made occasional forays into the supernatural field. Those stories were published in several mixed collections during her lifetime. The University of Tampa Press is proud to gather them together in this new edition edited by scholar S. T. Joshi, who provides an introduction, afterword, and notes on the text.
The Dead Hand & The Bride’s Chamber (74 pages)
“The Dead Hand” by Wilkie Collins and “The Bride’s Chamber” by Charles Dickens originally appeared as parts of The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices by Dickens and Collins (1857), a collaboration between two giants of nineteenth century literature, with the more famous of the two authors claiming the right to list his name first. The complete work is not often read today, but through Maria Bachman’s discerning presentation of this pair of intriguing stories—published together as stand-alone pieces for the first time here—we hope they will reach a new and wider audience. Edited with an introduction, afterword, and notes by Maria Bachman.
Each title is also available individually, in both paperback and hardback editions.
In All Their Animal Brilliance
Winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. This new book by Lance Larsen is described by Jane Hirshfield as “a book of startling, fierce, inventive talent.”Adam Zagajewski writes that it “is strong like steel and has streaks of intense poetic brilliance that make you jump.” Dean Young explains that “Lance Larsen attests again and again to the generous, transformative power of lived experience to plot the spirit’s magical trajectories.” And Lola Haskins says simply that the book “embodies what I feel poetry should be.”
History, Passion, Freedom, Death, and Hope
Award-winning poet Kelly Cherry includes advice to young poets and perceptive discussions of contemporary poetry and poetics in this rich new collection of prose about poetry. American poet Robert Wallace writes: “Poet, philosopher, novelist, translator, reviewer, Kelly Cherry is that rare thing—an American woman of letters. In this stunning compilation of her essays on the art of poetry . . . with grace, intelligence, eloquence, and above all music, she provides both a welcome road map to the poetry of the past half century and a companionable guide book to the major ideas of form and content that have shaped the contemporary aesthetic . . . Brilliant, original, these pieces sing; they dance; they levitate off the page.”
Going, Going . . . Almost Gone
This long-awaited companion volume to Citrus, Sawmills, Critters, & Crackers: Life in Early Lutz and Central Pasco County (now out of print) will be treasured by historians and residents alike. The authors have compiled a remarkable collection of unique documents, family photographs, oral histories, significant facts, and illuminating commentaries that preserve a rapidly vanishing Florida pioneer history. Here is a milestone work that traces agriculture and commerce, presents original maps of businesses and historic landmarks, affirms local customs and traditions, and sets new standards for local and regional history in the years to come.
Hardback Edition | $65.00
For Appearances
First winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, this collection by Jordan Smith is what Sandra McPherson calls “a gem of a book.” Liam Rector says, “Jordan Smith has written some of the most important poetry of the post-Vietnam generation. His melancholic portraits of Upstate life are comparable to what’s most poignant in Thomas Hardy, Edvard Munch, and Ingmar Bergman. There’s a moral seriousness, a wry Yankee humor, and a heartbreaking strength of sentiment at work in Smith’s poems. They partake of a Shaker aesthetic: useful, beautiful.”
Fire Eater
This remarkable first book traces complex and ultimately transformative connections between the poet and the landscape of her native Northern Minnesota. Author John Minczeski writes: “Kathleen Jesme searches through the rubble of the quiet, relentless fire within. Her poems abound in an exquisite attention to detail and craft. More than variations on the theme of fire, her poems fix upon the soul of fire, which is only possible by close inspection of her own soul, and ours as well.”
Family Records of the African American Pioneers
Illustrated with dozens of rare photographs and enlivened by scores of dramatic stories, this handsome hardcover book will serve as a basic reference for years to come. It preserves the family histories of 107 Tampa Bay area pioneers and includes a comprehensive index for easy access to more than 2,000 individual names.
Former Tampa Mayor Dick Greco wrote of it: “The stories of Tampa-area African American pioneers are tales of compelling drama, courage, determination, and sacrifice. Yet, much of the vital information contained in this volume has become available to us only with this publication. This achievement is long overdue and most welcome.”
Ditch-Tender
Julia B. Levine’s third book of poetry instills a dramatic appreciation for the fullness and challenge of each stage of life. With lyrical grace and a fearless perception, she writes of the public and private roles we play as child, parent, partner, lover, psychologist, neighbor, and friend. Along the way we are immersed in poetic experiences both complex and inspiring. In the words of poet Kate Northrop, Levine captures “the gorgeous and complicated evidence—of beauty, of love, of ruin and ‘essential hazards’—and through that process, through the images and wisdom of the poems, leads the reader to a richly imagined place, one where words still can heal.”
Coming Late to Rachmaninoff
Winner of the 2004 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. The poet’s Midwestern roots and rich perspectives enrich this first collection by a widely published poet and prize-winning author of creative nonfiction. Terrill has an eye for the ironic and the beautiful, an ear for music and the music of language. As poet Peggy Shumaker says, these are “edgy” and “tender” poems of “music, family, grief, the possibility of love—they’re all here.
Chair in the Desert
“Rick Chess’s poetry is a glass through which one sees brightly, openly, gladly thrillingly. . . Here is the language of life—life conditioned, bound, tangled, yet illumined and clarified by a transcendent Eye. One reads these shiningly honest lines and feels their blessing.” —Cynthia Ozick, author of The Puttermesser Papers and The Shawl
Carslaw’s Sequences
Lisa M. Steinman’s book was named one of five finalists in poetry for the Oregon Book Award. Steinman takes the title of her collection of poetry from the world of mathematics: Carslaw’s sequences are series of numbers that cannot be tidily summed. While this is something of a problem for mathematicians, it proves to be a delight for the poet. Her book was also a finalist for the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. Madeline DeFrees writes: “This is a stunning book, one to return to again and again.”
Calenture
In this memorable first book, Kent Shaw explores layers of devotion, illusion, and sacrifice in abstract and personal terms. At age eighteen, he enlisted for six years of service in the U.S. Navy. Midway through, his unadulterated patriotism shifted to unanticipated doubt. Calenture—whose title refers to a sickness sailors suffer as they come to believe the ocean is a meadow, try to walk into it, and find themselves drowning—draws upon rich seagoing metaphors to probe faith, change, and delusion. With poems of ocean and spirit, land and love, family and stranger, this book is anchored and buoyed by a sailor’s undeniable longing to experience a great voyage fully and to render it true and whole.“Shaw renders the familiar new, and the new fraught with power and language.” — American Poet (Fall 2008)
Bridging the Gap
“The Florida NAACP has played a very crucial role in the movement for social justice. Robert W. “Bob” Saunders has opened that history for all of us to share in this book . . . . that should be read by all Floridians as we seek to outline our path to the future. Without this strong insight from our past, our journey forward would be uncharted and misdirected. This work explains in great detail why we must continue the struggle for justice until victory is won.” —Leon W. Russell, Chairman, NAACP Board of Directors
“Take time to read this book. Learn the true details of Florida’s hard-fought civil rights battle from the mind and pen of the state’s premier civil rights leader.”—Dr. Larry Rivers, President, Fort Valley State University
Bent upon Light
Bent upon Light illuminates the gap between human reach and human grasp. It is no easy matter to look toward emptiness and reveal its contents. Yet Marjorie Stelmach’s poems cast light from that gap through a spiritual prism refracting and reflecting the ways our words so often fail to fit our world, the ways our dreams suggest landscapes we can’t discover in our waking lives, the ways we convert both nature and art into emblems, omens, or provisional visions that fill us with brief joy before we reach again.
Barnett
A fascinating and readable history of the Barnett Bank from its founding by William Boyd Barnett with his son and one clerk on a sandy unpaved road in frontier Jacksonville in 1877 to its glory days as Florida’s premier banking institution. Historian David Ginzl offers both anecdotes and insights as he recounts the story of the bank and the remarkable executives who led it. The book includes 76 photographs and illustrations.
Backyard Alchemy
Deft humor and poetic wisdom combine into a transformative book of poetry by Utah author Lance Larsen. Offering golden glimpses of ordinary moments, Backyard Alchemy prompted poet and American Book Award winner Jim Barnes to write: “This book may save your life. You will learn something you will need to know with each poem you read.” This is Larsen’s third book, and his second with the University of Tampa Press, which published In All Their Animal Brilliance in 2005 as winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry.
At Once
Jenny Browne’s first book-length collection of poetry was a finalist for the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. Author Naomi Shihab Nye describes the poems as “breathtaking” and writes that “they honor and illuminate everything they consider with deep intelligence and care.”
Ask
Winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. Levine’s Ask is beautifully described by poet Ruth Schwartz as “a stunning book” that “time and time again renders me speechless with awe and agreement.” Past recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry and winner of the Anhinga Prize in Poetry for her first collection, Levine also maintains an on-going clinical practice as a child psychologist. She draws from her own frontline experiences as a professional psychologist, a mother of three, and a daughter, in order to bring to light some of the more disturbing aspects of how our culture enacts love and desire. Poet Edward Hirsch praises it as “a book that asks us to think by feeling” and the judges wrote that “if a fearless gaze could speak, this would be its voice.”
Amidst a Storm of Bullets
“The Second Seminole War’s day-to-day reality can be discovered in no single source better than through the Henry Prince diary. . . Here the past is brought truly to life.” —Canter Brown, Jr., author and historian
Almost Dark
A new collection of poems from Richard Terrill, winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. Robert Dana says, “the rich weight of Richard Terrill’s poems is unmatched in the poems of any of his contemporaries. Empires of food, luxury, and time spring forth question after lush question after wise question.”
H. P. Lovecraft: A Comprehensive Bibliography
This new and exhaustively updated comprehensive bibliography from the University of Tampa Press presents, for the first time, a systematic catalog of Lovecraft’s writings from his first appearance in a newspaper in 1906 down to the end of 2007. All of his book publications—the great majority of them posthumous—are listed, along with their contents; appearances of his works in magazines and anthologies are tallied; and information is supplied on apocryphal works, texts edited by Lovecraft, and other miscellany.
The work is divided into three main sections:
1) Works by Lovecraft in English
2) Works by Lovecraft in Translation
3) Works About Lovecraft
A Woodcut Manual
The best book ever written about the art of woodcuts is back in print! This handsome new limited edition augments the original J. J. Lankes text with selections from his letters and miscellaneous writings to reveal the rich and multidimensional talents of an American master. With an introduction and commentary by Welford Dunaway Taylor plus dozens of woodcuts and decorations by Lankes, this book leaves no doubt about the truth of Robert Frost’s assessment: “No man ever dug a better thing out of wood.”
Studies in the Fantastic [#2]
CONTENTS: Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the New Dark Wave: The Decline and Fall of American Gothic Ethics by Zachary Z. E. Bennett; Mariah, My Soul-Mate by Daniel Pearlman; “Undoing the Mechanisms”: Genre Expectation, Subversion & Anti-Consolation in the Kefahuchi Tract Novels of M. John Harrison by Leigh Blackmore; The Value of the Supernatural in Fiction by Lafcadio Hearn; How Bria Died by Michael Aronovitz; Frustrated Love, Restless Death: On Robert Aickman’s “The Unsettled Dust” by Philip Challinor; To Horror by Robert Southey; What Happens in Ambrose Bierce’s “The Death of Halpin Frayser” by S. T. Joshi; Parental Shadows: The Influence of Robert Bloch’s Psycho on Thomas Harris by Benjamin Szumskyj; Selections from The Cutting Room Floor by Evan J. Peterson; Book Review: Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula reviewed by John Edgar Browning.
A University is Born
The University of Tampa from Its Inception to Adolescence, 1929-1936
The Seventy-fifth Anniversary edition of the memoirs of the first president of the University of Tampa. Foreword by Dr. Ronald L. Vaughn. Prologue by Frederick W. Spaulding. Illustrated with photographs.
A Study of Destiny
Count Louis Hamon—also known as Cheiro—was an Irishman who achieved international celebrity as a seer, palmist, numerologist, and bestselling author. A Study of Destiny (also published as The Hand of Fate) was his only work of fiction. This masterful story of a curse—and the fate of the cursed—has been out of print, except for one anthology appearance, since the 1890s. Volume II of the new “Insistent Visions” series.
A Map of Doubt and Rescue
Winner of the 2004 Pinter Review Prize for Drama, this new play by Susan Miller is a rich dramatic experience. Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angels in America, writes, “This is a lovely and ambitious play, suffused with generosity of spirit, from a writer whose courage, wit, and intelligence have always moved and inspired me.” And Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, describes it as “a kind of theatrical poem—characters are words, their longings delicious rhythms, their memories lyrical motion.” Francis Gillen, editor of The Pinter Review, sums it up: “It is a remarkable, lyrical achievement in theatre.”
A History of Disappearance
This strong and lyrical second book by Marjorie Stelmach, whose first collection won the Marianne Moore Prize, is strong evidence for Mona Van Duyn’s advice that this is a poet to keep an eye on. Poet Eric Pankey has written, “A History of Disappearance works a wonderful alchemy. The ephemeral, that which is always on the verge of disappearing, is recast into a mutable and lasting gold in Marjorie Stelmach’s elegant poems.”
Paperback Edition | $12.00
Hardback Edition | $20.00
Ybor City: the Making of a Landmark Town
This comprehensive history of a National Historic Landmark town was written by native son Frank Trebín Lastra, born and raised in Ybor City. With 488 pages and 633 photographs and illustrations, this book is sure to be a favorite for years to come. E. J. Salcines, Vice President of the Tampa Historical Society, writes: “Ybor City: The Making of a Landmark Town is a book that everyone interested in Tampa history should read and pass on together with family heirlooms. It is full of treasures of our past.”
Studies in the Fantastic [#1]
CONTENTS: Editorial by S. T. Joshi; Apparition of a Genre: The Psychical Case Study in the Pre-Modernist British Short Story by George M. Johnson; Dark Fantasy and Compulsion in Henrich Marschner’s Der Vampyr by Robert H. Waugh; “Passenger Bastion” and “Into Your Tenement I’ll Creep” by Jonathan Thomas; New Verse by Fred Phillips, Anne K. Schwader, and Leigh Blackmore; The Icy Depths of Robert Aickman’s “Niemandswasser” by Philip Challinor; “Through the Gates of Darkness”: The Cosmopolitan Gothic of J. Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker by John Langan; A Spider in the Distance by Joseph S. Pulver Sr.; On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror (1773) by Anna Letitia Barbauld; Vintage Verse by Edward Thomas, Edwin Markham, and Madison Cawein; “Every Night a Magic Door’: An Approach to the Weird Verse of Victor Daley by Phillip A. Ellis; Barbarism vs. Civilization: Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft in Their Correspondence by S. T. Joshi
Count Four.
Forthcoming October 2020: Count Four, winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, is a book about trying to reconcile the conflicting elements of one’s identity and attempting to understand and articulate the forces that are shaping it. Many of the poems in the collection were written over years the poet spent as a musician in and around the East Coast punk scene. The poet tries to make sense of how the things and people he loves most in this environment are also the very things most likely to destroy him.