Spring 2016 • • UNIVERSITY of ARKANSAS PRESS 1 MILLER WILLIAMS POETRY SERIES

CONTENTS New University of Arkansas Press Books 1–11 UpSet Press 12 Readability. DVDs 13 Moon City Press 14–15 Freshness of language. Butler Center Books 16–19 Seriousness of intent. Cloudland / Ozark Society 20 Selected Backlist 21–23 Awards and Reviews 24 Ordering Information inside back Gent Jones McKee Wilkins “Four very different poets, who have readability, freshness of language, and seriousness of intent in common. .We have here a gathering of young poets whose work, I think, would have fully engaged and gladdened Miller Williams. Because I have sat with him there, I can picture Miller in his study turning the pages, maybe stopping to make a pencil note in a margin. Miller’s ON THE COVER: Woodcut by Howard Simon, from Back Yonder: wider hope, of course, was that the poems published An Ozark Chronicle (page 11), the first in a new series of books writ- in this series would find a broad readership, ready to be ten about the Ozarks in the Depression era that played a crucial delighted and inspired. I join my old friend and editor role in establishing simplistic and reductionist stereotypes, both in that wish.” positive and negative, of Ozarkers and the Ozarks. —Billy Collins @uarkpress pages 2 through 4 facebook.com/uarkpress HISTORY / POLITICS Brother Bill President Clinton and the Politics of Race and Class DARYL A. CARTER Bill Clinton’s political relationship with African Americans “This book is a fascinating analysis of race and class in the age of President Bill Clinton. It provides much-needed clarity in regards to the myth of the ‘First Black President.’ It contributes much to our understanding of the history that informs our present moment!” —CORNEL WEST As President Barack Obama was sworn into office on January 20, 2009, the United States was abuzz with talk of the first African American president. At this historic moment, one man standing on the inaugural plat- form, seemingly a relic of the past, had actually been called the “first black president” for years. President William Jefferson Clinton had enjoyed the support of African Americans during his political career, but the man from Hope also had a complex and tenuous relationship with this faction of his political base. Clinton stood at the nexus of intense political battles between conservatives’ demands for a return to the past and African Americans’ demands for change and equality. He also struggled with class dynamics dividing the American electorate, especially African Americans. Those with financial means seized newfound opportunities to go to college, enter the professions, pursue entrepreneurial ambitions, and engage in mainstream politics, while those without financial means were essen- tially left behind. The former became key to Clinton’s political success as he skillfully negotiated the African American class structure while at the same time maintaining the support of white Americans. The results were tremendously positive for some African Americans. For others, the Clinton presidency was devastating. Brother Bill examines President Clinton’s political relationship with African Americans and illuminates the nuances of race and class at the end of the twentieth century, an era of technological, political, and social upheaval. OF RELATED INTEREST DARYL A. CARTER is associate professor of history at East Tennessee Aaron Henry of Mississippi State University. He specializes in modern American political history and Inside Agitator African American history. Minion K. C. Morrison $34.95 cloth • 978-1-55728-759-5 e-book • 978-1-61075-564-1 JUNE Medgar Evers 6 x 9 • 300 pages Mississippi Martyr $26.95 paper • 978-1-55728-699-4 Michael Vinson Williams $24.95 paper 978-1-55728-646-8 $54.95 (s) cloth • 978-1-68226-002-9 • e-book • 978-1-61075-487-3 e-book • 978-1-61075-585-6 Spring 2016 • www.uapress.com • UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS PRESS 1 MILLER WILLIAMS POETRY SERIES [explicit lyrics] Poems ANDREW GENT Winner, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize “Andrew Gent’s [explicit lyrics] is a fascinating collection of poems that slip through their own cracks and seem to vanish before the reader’s eyes. [Gent’s] influences are a matter of guesswork, but I’d say he has learned some of his admirable tricks from Yannis Ritsos and some of the New York School. Surprises lurk on almost every page.” —BILLY COLLINS Randall Jarrell said that when you read a poem “you are entering a for- eign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own.” In [explicit lyrics], we are visitors to a world that is familiar, as if the poems are occurring in our town, on the streets where we live. But the laws have changed, and what is normally important is no longer relevant. What was meaningless is now everything. As the title indicates, these poems are lyrics—musings on the small decisions required by existence in the modern world. They contain the grand themes of art—life, love, and mortality—but not where you expect. The smallest and most mundane objects become the catalyst for reevaluating our roles in society and the world. This is not poetry as art. This is life as art, from a country where poetry is the only language. ANDREW GENT was born in England, grew up in Ohio, and now lives in New Hampshire. He makes his living as a technical writer and information architect in the computer industry. His poetry has appeared in the Chicago Review, Painted Bride, New Honolulu Review, and Poetry East, among other magazines. MARCH 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 80 pages $17.95 paper • 978-1-55728-695-6 e-book • 978-1-61075-581-8 OF RELATED INTEREST Reveille Poems George David Clark $17.95 paper • 978-1-55728-674-1 e-book • 978-1-61075-559-7 To the Bramble and the Briar Poems Steve Scafidi $16.95 paper • 978-1-55728-651-2 e-book • 978-1-61075-536-8 2 UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS PRESS • www.uapress.com • Spring 2016 MILLER WILLIAMS POETRY SERIES Cenotaph Poems BROCK JONES Finalist, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize “It’s hard to imagine poems that better exhibit grace under the pressure of writing about war and its cruel aftereffects.” —BILLY COLLINS Out of the contradiction, paradox, loss, and strange beauty of contem- porary warfare, Brock Jones brings us Cenotaph, a collection of poems that have as their genesis Jones’s deployments to Iraq in 2003 and 2005, when he was in the US Army. These are war poems, but also love poems and hate poems, poems about dying and living, poems about hope and hopelessness. These are poems that beautifully reflect Jones’s resignation to and rejection of the impossibility of saying anything definitive or honest about war. These are poems that strive to do what poet Bruce Weigl described as the poet’s job: to find “some kind of miraculous way that if you work hard enough to get the words right, that which you call ‘horrific and wrong’ is defeated.” Cenotaph is a poet doing the poet’s work: trying, hoping to get the words right. BROCK JONES was born and raised in Utah. He served three tours of duty in Iraq and one in Afghanistan for the US Army. His poetry has appeared in the Iowa Review, Lunch Ticket, Ninth Letter, Sugar House Review, and other journals. He is currently pursuing a PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Utah. MARCH 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 65 pages $17.95 paper • 978-1-55728-172-2 e-book • 978-1-61075-586-3 OF RELATED INTEREST Day of the Border Guards Poems Katherine E. Young $16.95 paper • 978-1-55728-655-0 e-book • 978-1-61075-539-9 Ghost Gear Poems Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum $16.95 • paper • 978-1-55728-654-3 e-book • 978-1-61075-538-2 Spring 2016 • www.uapress.com • UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS PRESS 3 MILLER WILLIAMS POETRY SERIES See You Soon Poems LAURA MCKEE Finalist, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize “Delightfully unpredictable poems full of fresh turns and local surprises in which irony and smarts blend agreeably with credible feeling.” —BILLY COLLINS The poems in See You Soon endeavor to test the limits of metaphor and language as their voices speak from the beauty and strangeness of daily experience, testing how we make sense of ourselves to ourselves and to one another. There is love in these poems, and there is failure and absurdity. The characters, in their various situations and guises, find themselves outside of time, space, and identity—at sunset, in an airport, outside a hookah lounge, as a birthday party clown, after a flood. Influenced by H.D., Donald Barthelme, Iris Murdoch, and Gertrude Stein, this work strives to form a resonance chamber for tone and logic that could sustain an intransitive experience of language. The message here is in the invitation of the title—See You Soon—a statement of the complexity of two people going in a mutual direction in time, and of camaraderie along the way. LAURA MCKEE was born in California and grew up in Oregon and Utah. She holds an MFA from the University of Washington. In 2009, her book Uttermost Paradise Place was selected by Claudia Keelan for the Honickman First Book prize. She lives in Seattle, Washington. MARCH 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 60 pages $17.95 paper • 978-1-55728-696-3 e-book • 978-1-61075-582-5 OF RELATED INTEREST Afternoon Masala Poems Vandana Khanna $16.95 paper • 978-1-55728-653-6 e-book • 978-1-61075-537-5 The Law of Falling Bodies Poems Elton Glaser $16.00 paper • 978-1-55728-996-4 e-book • 978-1-61075-513-9 4 UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS PRESS • www.uapress.com • Spring 2016 Spring 2016 • www.uapress.com • UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS PRESS 5 MILLER WILLIAMS POETRY SERIES When We Were Birds Poems JOE WILKINS Finalist, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize “Joe Wilkins’s poems are located in the tradition of the sacred, but holi- ness here is found in common experience.

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