The Current That Carries: Stories (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction Ser.)

This collection bristles and hums with the rugged resilience one encounters in southern and Appalachian fiction where ghosts of loved ones and livestock alike haunt an underworld of lonely trails. Set in West Virginia, the stories take up residence with rural characters who defend their mailboxes against teenagers, bathe and feed their bedridden elders, and circle the inflated orbs of love and desire in high school gymnasiums. Whole lifetimes flare in an instant as characters scramble to sift through the past’s wreckage to find some small miracle in the present. If there is nostalgia, it’s for a South without billboards, talk shows, and children with iPods dangling from their ears. It’s for a South where you can go pick a ripe tomato to slice for the mayonnaise on your sandwich because you found time to plant a garden. And if there’s grace, it is in the careful wading through a shifting current to reach possibilities snagged at the bottom of a trotline. In lean, muscular prose, Lisa Graley pays homage to the daily chores that makeup a lifetime. With delicate precision, she renders the boundaries between fear and courage, indifference and compassion as thin as the blade of a shovel.

Literature & Fiction

Graley, Lisa

Short Stories & Anthologies

University of Georgia Press

This collection bristles and hums with the rugged resilience one encounters in southern and Appalachian fiction where ghosts of loved ones and livestock alike haunt an underworld of lonely trails. Set in West Virginia, the stories take up residence with rural characters who defend their mailboxes against teenagers, bathe and feed their bedridden elders, and circle the inflated orbs of love and desire in high school gymnasiums. Whole lifetimes flare in an instant as characters scramble to sift through the past’s wreckage to find some small miracle in the present.If there is nostalgia, it’s for a South without billboards, talk shows, and children with iPods dangling from their ears. It’s for a South where you can go pick a ripe tomato to slice for the mayonnaise on your sandwich because you found time to plant a garden. And if there’s grace, it is in the careful wading through a shifting current to reach possibilities snagged at the bottom of a trotline.In lean, muscular prose, Lisa Graley pays homage to the daily chores that makeup a lifetime. With delicate precision, she renders the boundaries between fear and courage, indifference and compassion as thin as the blade of a shovel.

Winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award--“Lisa Graley’s strange and beautiful book-length poem, Box of Blue Horses, is unlike any other poem I have read and unlike the work of any other poet I know. The richness of her language somewhat suggests Hart Crane’s voyages among the adagios of his islands. But her words are more than merely beautiful.…With each of my readings of this book, Lisa Graley’s Blue Horses grew richer and more powerful, which is exactly what we demand and expect of the finest poetry.”—John Wood For all the people who have ever closed off or tamped down some essential part of themselves—imagination, a talent, a passion—and then wished to have that aspect “unboxed,” this book is worth examination. Here, in a cycle of 44 poems about a herd of blue horses and the persona’s quest to track them, poet Lisa Graley explores the crippling effects of stifling creative impulses as well as the tensions, costs, and joys involved in living an unfettered life. "Box of Blue Horses" is a meditation on the fear of creativity. But it is a meditation in the form of a story about magnificent blue horses, inspired, in part, by the blue horse paintings of Franz Marc. Stylistically, the volume is an experimental blurring of genres, having at its heart the musicality of lyric poetry while incorporating the complex characterization and narrative story arc you might find in a novel.

Box of Blue Horses

Poetry

Gival Press

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Books by Graley, Lisa

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Graley, Lisa. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Current That Carries: Stories (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction Ser.)

The Current That Carries: Stories (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction Ser.)

The Current That Carries: Stories (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction Ser.)

Box of Blue Horses