Invited Guest

Mencken's stinging characterization of the American South as "the Sahara of the Bozart" reflects an understandable frustration with the narrow view of the canon of southern literature. With its focus on novelists, it largely ignores the works of all but a few poets--the Fugitives Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and John Crowe Ransom, and the larger-than-life James Dickey among them. Invited Guest is the first anthology that attempts to reach beyond this small coterie to encompass the range and brilliance of twentieth-century southern poetry. Editors David Rigsbee and Steven Ford Brown have compiled the works of a richly diverse collection of poets--all born or raised southerners.Women and African Americans are recognized for their alternative, subversive contributions to southern aesthetics; the myopic, often scathing views of the New Critics or the overly historicist agendas of identity politics are discarded in favor of a middle ground that allows for inclusion on both aesthetic and historical bases.Along with a respectful acknowledgement of the contributions of the most popular figures in southern poetry, Rigsbee and Brown offer long-overdue attention to underrecognized poets such as Anne Spencer, John Beecher, Eleanor Ross Taylor, and Alice Dunbar Nelson. The juxtaposition of the canonical and the little-known makes Invited Guest an intriguing illustration of the abundance and range of poetry in the twentieth-century South.

Invited Guest, as is the case with really good anthologies, significantly shapes the history of the literature it surveys.-Mary Ellis Gibson, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, editor of Homeplaces: Stories of the South by Women Writers; ""Rigsbee and Brown have selected not only the well-known or signature poems but also poems that are not often anthologized, making Invited Guest fresh and interesting. This work is enjoyable and informative, incisive and insightful.""-Joanne V. Gabbin, James Madison University, editor of The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry

David Rigsbee is Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Language and Literature at Mount Olive College, and the author of six collections of poetry and critical works on Joseph Brodsky and Carolyn Kizer. Steven Ford Brown is the editor of Astonishing World: The Selected Poems of Angel Gonzalez, 1956-1986.