Search results for ""Southeast Missouri State University Press""

Hospice Plastics - each of the title's words denote two key thematic threads woven through the book. This somewhat autobiographical collection of poetry focuses on the illnesses and deaths of the poet's parents during her teen years, focusing on palliative care and literal plastics: medical tools and supplies-artificial, grotesquely present, weirdly funny, sublimely comforting. Ultimately, Hospice Plastics is a deeply personal and profoundly affecting examination of the self in relation to those items, as well as in relation to themes of material consumption and waste.

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Weird Pig is about Weird Pig, a pig who wants to do right. But doing right isn't always easy. He drinks. He eats pork chops. He rides a skateboard. He gets his fellow farm animals murdered, and fathers an illegitimate son who has a messiah complex. When Weird Pig leaves the farm he calls home, he inspires a series of children's books that help bring on the end of his little world - a farm where human and beast alike toil in the shadow of an ever-growing factory livestock complex. From farm to table and beyond, follow the misadventures of Weird Pig in this kaleidoscopic portrait of America, seen through the eyes of a crazed animal who insists on making himself at home there.

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The anthology Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors showcases writing from military veterans and their families from across the nation, including writing about WWI and WWII, Vietnam, the Gulf Conflict, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The anthology is the seventh in an annual series published by Southeast Missouri State University Press in Cooperation with the Missouri Humanities Council's Veterans Projects and the Warriors Arts Alliance. The Missouri Humanities Council plans to expand the partnership to include additional organizations that are both concerned and supportive of American veterans.

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Look Alive documents the construction of a queer femme self in the hostile territory of American late capitalism. Its speaker encounters darkness - in the form of violence perpetrated by both individuals and by societal systems of power and oppression - and yet, rejects the narratives articulated by that violence, celebrating instead softness and gentleness, and ultimately, cleaving to the natural world in all its radiant, mysterious queerness.

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Author of the award-winning Prague Summer returns with a new story collection that explores American lives both at home and abroad in the age of anxiety—a world gone sour with regret, where only the small intimacies that sometimes blossom between people offer any kind of hope or possibility for redemption.In the title story, a seemingly idyllic European vacation ends abruptly when a woman goes missing, leaving her lover to come to terms with the disappointingly minor role he’s played in her life. In "Salt of the Earth," the story of a Manhattan restaurant is told through the lives of its employees, reminding us that turmoil can be assuaged one savory bite at a time, and that some spaces, through the time we spend there, can become sacred. In "Gepetto’s Workshop," an American expatriate returns to the United States to help the daughter of his former lover open a business and, in the process, comes to terms with his own emotional poverty. And "In Costume" follows the life of a Jane Austen reenactor whose sudden connection with Hollywood royalty opens up the possibility of a bigger career—but at what price?Jeffrey Condran’s Claire, Wading Into the Danube By Night is an intense and sophisticated collection of stories in which characters travel the world in search of truths that aren’t always comfortable, and companionship that doesn’t always make sense.

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With attention to the Japanese occupation, the Korean War and its aftermath, The People’s Field reflects on the sounds, ideas and histories of the Korean peninsula. Of her selection, contest judge Jenny Yang Cropp writes, “Kwon’s manuscript contains a paradoxical experience of both movement and stillness, history and the eternal present. These poems, short and spare, carry the intensity of distillation but resist the epigrammatic as they show us a rich and complex landscape that asks for and earns reading after reading.”

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