Boiling It Down: :The Electronic Poetry Chapbooks of Larry D. Thomas

Literature & Fiction

THOMAS, Larry D.

United States

Blue Horse Press

Your Daughter's Country: Poems

Dorsey, John

Poetry

Inasmuch as the first three of Larry D. Thomas's eleven full-length poetry collections were largely set in West Texas where he was born and reared, his poetry became associated by many of his readers with the landscapes and people of West Texas and the Trans-Pecos region of the state. Although eleven of his print books, however, contain poems inspired by the Mississippi River Delta, In a Field of Cotton is his first poetry collection dedicated entirely to the Delta region and culture to which Thomas is vitally connected in spirit, emotion and by bloodline. The following is excerpted from his preface to In a Field of Cotton: “I am inextricably connected to the Mississippi River Delta in spirit, emotion, and by bloodline. Three of my grandparents, born in western Tennessee around 1880 (my paternal grandfather was born in Texas; his father was born in Mississippi), migrated to west Texas in the late 1890s. They traveled by covered wagon. All four of them worked their entire lives as tenant cotton farmers, although my paternal grandfather was also a mule trader. They plowed the cotton fields with mules, and hand-picked the cotton as soon as it was ready for harvesting. My mother and father, who were thirty-nine and forty years of age, respectively, at the time of my birth, also hand-picked cotton into their late twenties until my father started working at a Mobil service station. From the early years of my childhood, I heard stories about my family's experiences on the tenant farms, and was fascinated by how they hand-picked cotton much like the black slaves on plantations throughout the American South. These stories made me feel a strong connection to blacks and black culture which I still feel to this day.”

In a Field of Cotton: Mississippi River Delta Poems

:boys is a cartography of scars, bloodlines, wounds that stretch between generations, between the living and the dead. These are poems lush with song, familial love, and the gritty intimacies of masculinity. Johnson writes a narrative lyric that breaks your heart and glues it back together again. From fields of ragweed to parking lots where El Caminos bump Beastie Boys, we hear a son’s cry, a father’s howl, a dark music that transcends the wounded world, “Charting //a route from here to someplace in Heaven.”— Kai Carlson-Wee, author of Rail (BOA Editions)

Boys

Johnson, Luke J.

Poetry and associated photographs of coming of age and inheritance in the Midwest.

The Inheritance: Poems and Photographs

Hamm, Justin

Literary

Poems of Detroit, its rise, fall, and regeneration.

Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit

Meisel, Ken

Ophelia's tragedies haunt us: grief leads her to insanity, and the river takes her life. Yet madness and water may act as conduits for the cycle of death-rebirth-growth. Liminal spaces expand the narrow story of tragic ends. This book draws on possibilities found in the spaces between: health and illness, life and death, sanity and madness. Slip into this poetic river and hazard the deep, tenuous currents pulling at self and other, connection and loss. This is a work of transformation.

Ophelia on Acid

Bradpiece, Jennifer

A collection of poems on the origins of social and religious life.

Provenance: Poems

Campbell, Rick

Night Surgery

McCarthy, Julianna

The Beasts That Vanish

Maginnes, Al

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