Dear Dreamland

Literature & Fiction

Johnson, Markham

Poetry

Lamar University Press

In Underground Musicans Carol Coffee Reposa presents a delicious double metaphor of geography and color. In her itinerary she leads us first to Mexico and Ecuador, then to Western Europe, to Russia, then back home. In this collection, so much depends upon images-the pulse of guitars and trumpets in Veracruz, the Nazca lines spiraling across the horizon, the picture of Lucifer's face turned away as God hurls him from the heavens and scores of other images that, in Carol's talented hands, carry literal and metaphoric meanings. With this book Carol Coffee Reposa establishes herself as one of the most insightful of Texas poets.

Underground Musicians

Reposa, Carol Coffee

Dr. Jean Andrews' story of Leroy Colombo is an engrossing biographical tale about a deaf man succeeding during an era when disabled people were largely shunned. Colombo chose a life that allowed him to excel in saving lives as a lifeguard and winning swimming contests. Andrews deftly sets up scenarios that explain why Colombo's remarkable feats resulted in his being beloved and never ignored in the beach community of Galveston, Texas during his lifetime. This is a good read.

High Tides, Low Tides the Story of Leroy Colombo

Biographies & Memoirs

Andrews, Jean F.

Community & Culture

These are quiet, intimate, witty conversational poems addressing how the human heart forgets itself under personal injury and the stinging justice of misery, and then, in the poignancy of remembering itself, is reborn again, unyielding, ready for "another waltz at the window, one more dance." If pain is "unresurrected" truth, then healing is "coming back to familiar spots to remember" a world we forgot existed or that we never even expected. Read this book and let your heart be healed.

Crownfeathers and Effigies

Bradley, Jerry

Here are insightful poems for an age that craves information and celebrity gossip. Erin Murphy skillfully employs meter, rhyme, line, stanza and even erasure to shine lights on minor characters adjacent to the stars. Her instinct for narrative and formal variation delivers fine monologues that sparkle and surprise.

Ancilla

Murphy, Erin

Parkinson's disease and poetry square off in this volume written from the perspectives of a caregiver and her husband. With grit, humor, and compassion, Jan Seale spells out the vicissitudes of dealing with this so-far incurable neurological condition affecting seven million people worldwide. From onset through progression and treatment to final simple toleration, the poems testify to the mysteries and vagaries of the disease. Seeing faces in everything, lacking the ability to smile, stalling in doorways, obsessing on creativity-these and other peculiar symptoms of the brain syndrome are explored in accessible poetry from the desk of a Texas poet laureate.

The Parkinson Poems

Seale, Jan

In this series of linked short stories you will meet folk who inhabit the stark and wild countryside of West Texas, terrain that helps define them as well as the values that elicit many to behave in ways that will startle you. Here are only a few of the characters you will have the privilege of meeting: Otto, a boy who struggles with the slippery nature of words, is captured and tortured by Comanche raiders. Riding with the Comanches is Thomas Jefferson, a black man tries to help Otto. Deputy Sheriff Justan Brady tries in his inept way "to fix Danny Fowler's killing." Dee Price would willingly show you her knife scars as well as her mastectomy scars yet she is still capable of surprising you with her solution to the murder of Danny Fowler. Like many other characters in Trashy Behavior, you will meet Dee Price in more than one story. A young Gregory drives to a ranch to deliver a car to his boss's wife who tries to seduce him, then as he leaves, he runs into two men who blast his car with sawed-off shotguns. There are many other vividly-presented West Texans in the pages of this collection of stories, ones you will remember long after reading the book. While these are linked stories, you can read them in any order, and all of the tales will grab your attention and keep you turning pages. "Bankers"-the story featuring Gregory and his trouble delivering his boss's car-won Kay Cattrulla Award for Short Fiction presented by the Texas Institute of Letters for the best story by a Texan in 2012.

Trashy Behavior

Sanderson, Jim

Literary

The Crone at the Casino

McCann, Janet

'A Shared Voice' is a conversation in narrative by twenty-four of the finest fiction writers in America. A total of twenty-four tales, each linked to another by at least one literary element such as character or setting or theme, make up this first-of-its-kind anthology by writers from Texas and the Carolinas. The individual short stories in 'A Shared Voice' include twelve anchor tales-six by writers from Texas and six by writers from the Carolinas-and twelve original works of fiction written in response to the anchor narratives. The result is a rich and varicolored tapestry of narrative voices by writers who have spent their lives weaving tales.

A Shared Voice

United States

Jan Seale's capable evocation of peculiar personalities mixes with her sense of nostalgia and richly drawn places to create an ambiance of the extraordinary in the most commonplace of circumstances. Her characters are a delightful collection of people bewildered by life and haunted by memory but who also find themselves relying on the confidence of experience and the solidity of conviction to press on, no matter what. This is a delightful collection of insightful vignettes that remind us how human and vulnerable we all are, how wrong we often can be, and how, in the long run, it's the integrity of our intentions that makes all the difference.

Appearances

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Books by Lamar University Press