A two year old mystery. A missing daughter. A cross country road trip. Chris, an aerospace engineer, is on a mission. He abandons his life in Savannah and drives west. Along the way, first in New Orleans and then in Austin, he picks up passengers. Julia, a Czech woman fleeing a boyfriend and business partner, and JC, the daughter of a Baptist minister, who on a manic whim joins them and leaves her life in Austin behind. Displaced, in flight from their respective pasts, with Chris planning a revenge he may not have the nerve or the opportunity to exact, the three form shifting alliances and friendships as they drive across Texas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California. In Los Angeles, they rent a house in Venice Beach and explore the city—graveyards, art districts, the L.A. County Coroner’s Office, Catalina Island, bars, boardwalks, promenades, tar pits, dances clubs, flight museums. On Christmas Eve in a Holmby Hills mansion, the story culminates in a confrontation with the man Chris believes to be partly responsible for the disappearance of his daughter.

Degenerate is a road trip novel out of Kerouac and Nabokov, a comedy of revenge and satire about Los Angeles that brings to mind Nathaniel West and a story of love and loss at turns lyrical, hilarious and heartbreaking.

 

 

 

At once a highly suspenseful psychological thriller and an ambitious literary work told from multiple points of view, Rivers Last Longer takes its turns, sometimes satirically, through the New York literary, art, and film worlds as it tells its story of friendship, ambition, murder, and love.

Richard Burgin is the author of twelve books, including a novel, Ghost Quartet, and six story collections. (A seventh is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press.) His book The Identity Club: New and Selected Stories was listed by The Times Literary Supplement as one of the Best Books of 2006, and three of his other story collections were listed as Notable Books of the Year by The Philadelphia Inquirer. Five of his stories have won Pushcart Prizes, and others have been reprinted in The Best American Mystery Stories 2005 and The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction 2008, among numerous others. Burgin’s nonfiction books include Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges and Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer. He is the founder and editor of Boulevard, now in its 25th year of publication.

 

 

Whether conversational or incantatory, each strives to approximate music, in keeping with the author’s insistence that dancer and dance be one.

William Bedford Clark is a native Oklahoman who lived in Louisiana, Connecticut, and North Carolina prior to settling in Texas in 1977. A professor of English at Texas A&M University, he has published widely in the field of American literature and is general editor of the Robert Penn Warren Correspondence Project.

"I am sometimes fortunate enough to discover a superior talent that has lain unexposed for many years in my own back yard. Scarcely fifty miles to my west Bedford Clark has been writing and publishing poetry as good as any written in the country, and yet, but for an e-mail inquiry, I might never have stumbled upon him. Here in his first book of poems is a collection of fine poetry with a broad range of technique and subject matter: that dresses itself in the loose robes of free verse or dons the formal dress of the sonnet; that treats the lowly ant lion and then the mystical Lilith; that focuses on tenure deliberations and lawn care and then the tragedies of the Oklahoma City bombing and Hurricane Katrina. I can say of Bedford Clark what I have heard said of Yeats and so said of him myself: ‘Here is a poet who never wrote a bad line and who knows how to end a poem.’" —Paul Ruffin, 2009 Texas State Poet Laureate

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Following on the heels of the highly successful Upon This Chessboard of Nights and Days: Voices from Texas Death Row, which enjoyed international exposure through a Voice of America piece that appeared on television, radio, and the Internet, this sequel introduces readers once again to the world of the inmates who sit on Texas Death Row, awaiting their date with death. The first book focused exclusively on nonfiction prose and art, whereas this second book presents an even greater range of their creative expressions through fiction, poetry, and art.

Readers will be amazed to discover the level of talent that resides among these forgotten members of society who do, indeed, live in another world.

 

Mark Robertson
#000992

"When It's At Your Door"

 

You sit, lay the tax, and wait for nothing—
another damp night in the yellow light of cheap bulbs
within the gray walls amongst men,
killers, who struggle for their lives.
"You will be laid into the earth" they say,
"Laid by men in linen clothes and white linen hats,
For the state doesn't buy wool."
Hmpf.
You sleep at dusk, dawn, night or day.
It doesn't really matter.
It doesn't matter at all.
You have the responsibilities of a rock:
just sit and wait till some force comes
and holds you sway and makes you cry,
like the cold, hard men whom I've seen
with tears in their eyes.
I shouldn't be surprised.
It drives you mad. It drives you crazy,
but you cannot go insane;
the sanity is all that keeps you going,
when darkness surrounds your day.
And when the sleep does not come
you just lie there, wearily,
wondering when you'll fly out of your body
and into the bliss of night, still wondering
if there really is a hell; a place where you'll burn
for the pleasures procured.
So you count the tickets of sin,
the receipts of your deeds, but
you're always in the red.
And you hear the voices prattling all the time,
some of god, some of money, some of love gone by,
and you think how stupid their conversation is.
They argue and scream, making a constant fuss,
yet if they are silent, mute and still,
then perhaps, just perhaps,
they will become just like you.
But do you really fear?
Yes, perhaps a little, as the child,
who once feared the dark room
with the open, closet door, yet as with all trips,
as with all fears in time, you learn to learn
what's feared and what's trite,
and you care for neither, for neither care for you,
so over you roll, slapping your pillow,
looking at the time, hoping your neighbor
does not hear, cannot hear,
the thoughts within your mind.

The editors of Texas Death Row: Reflections of a Different World were members of the Fall 2009 graduate Editing and Publishing Practicum taught by Paul Ruffin at Sam Houston State University. All are pursuing masters of arts degrees from SHSU.

 

 

What he wants in life, however, is not what he needs, and his desire for the money may prevent him from finding what he truly needs.

Daniel Robinson studied in the writing program at the University of Denver.  He has published stories in numerous reviews and magazines, and his first novel, After the Fire, was published by The Lyons Press in 2003.  That novel was based on first career—fighting wildfires.  He lives with his wife and daughter in Fort Collins, Colorado.

The title poem, for Anthony Hecht "a truly great success in its knitting together of the modern scene, recent history, and Homeric myth," finds a wizened Penelope hawking embroidery to tourists. Another recalls the death of Marilyn Monroe--how it awakened the sexual consciousness of a boy for whom her spirit became the scent of cured tobacco. An odyssey whose settings range from the Carolinas to Crete, from the Romsdal Fjord to the Buffalo River, Penelope's Design also pays homage to such geniuses of place as Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman, in whose Shropshire a 50-year-old literary pilgrim meets his own lightfoot ghost. Often elegiac, these richly allusive poems smile at the diminishing returns of aging and capture glimmers of a numinous Otherwhere.

"The memories of ‘a dream-disheveled child’ in the Deep South unfold into the meditative travels of the literary man in these elegant, assured poems, riddled with starlight, richly enlivened with deep-dyed images of nature and art, and a meticulous ear for echoes both allusive and actual, in a language as sensual as it is referential."—Eleanor Wilner, author of Reversing the Spell and The Girl with Bees in Her Hair

David Havird grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, and studied at the university there under James Dickey. He completed his graduate studies at the University of Virginia with a doctoral dissertation on Thomas Hardy. Not a prolific poet, still he has published for many years in major journals: Agni, The New Yorker, Poetry, the Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, the Yale Review—not to mention the Texas Review—and online at Poetry Daily. He lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he teaches at Centenary College.