Andrew Hudgins

A long narrative poem follows the life of Sidney Lanier, a Southern poet, and his experiences during the Civil War

A Narrative

After the Lost War

Poems deal with nature, death, responsibility, guilt, dreams, religion, childhood, memories, the past, premonitions, and violence

Saints and Strangers

NEVER-ENDING PA

A Southern Childhood

The Glass Hammer

Poems

Babylon in a Jar

"Since Andrew Hudgins was a child, he was a compulsive joke teller, so when he sat down to write about jokes, he found that he was writing about himself--what jokes taught him and mistaught him, how they often delighted him but occasionally made him nervous with their delight in chaos and sometimes anger. Because Hudgins's father, a West Point graduate, served in the US Air Force, his family moved frequently; he learned to relate to other kids by telling jokes and watching how his classmates responded. And jokes opened him up to the serious, taboo subjects that his family didn't talk about openly--religion, race, sex, and death. Hudgins tells and analyzes the jokes that explore the contradictions in the Baptist religion he was brought up in, the jokes that told him what his parents would not tell him about sex, and the racist jokes that his uncle loved, his father hated, and his mother, caught in the middle, was ambivalent about. This book is both a memoir and a meditation on jokes and how they educated,delighted, and occasionally horrified him as he grew"--

A Memoir

The Joker

A volume of tongue-in-cheek nursery rhymes by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-nominated author of Ecstatic in the Poison includes such whimsical titles as "The Thumping of the Bed," "Two Starving Kids in Africa," and "Daddy, Are We Meat?"

Instructive Poetry for Very, Very Bad Children

Shut Up You're Fine

An autobiographical sequence of poems captures the richness and the pain, the rebellion and the tragedy of growing up in the South, chronicling the lives of two brothers living in a military family.

New Poems

The Never-ending

An award-winning poet and compulsive joke teller shares a personal account that remembers the jokes that educated him about history, religion and family, from revelatory sex jokes that informed his adolescence and racial jokes that estranged his relatives to the jokes he has used to court and romance his wife. 35,000 first printing.

Poems deal with gardens, the cycle of nature, religious paintings, and family experiences

American Rendering showcases twenty-four new poems as well as a generous selection from Andrew Hudgins’s six previous volumes, spanning a distinguished career of more than twenty-five years. Hudgins, who was born in Texas and spent most of his childhood in the South, is a lively and prolific poet who draws on his vivid Southern and,more specifically, Southern Baptist, childhood. Influenced by writers such as John Crowe Ransom,William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and James Dickey, Hudgins has developed a distinctively descriptive form of the Southern Gothic imagination. His poems are rich with religious allusions, irreverent humor, and at times are inflected with a dark and violent eroticism.Of Hudgins’s most recent collection, Ecstatic in the Poison, Mark Strand wrote: “[It] is full of intelligence, vitality, and grace. And there is a beautiful oddness about it.Dark moments seem charged with an eerie luminosity and the most humdrum events assume a startling lyric intensity. A deep resonant humor is everywhere, and everywhere amazing.”

New and Selected Poems

American Rendering

A collection of laugh-out-loud tongue-in-cheek nursery rhymes that do for poetry what Edward Gorey did for cartooning. Illustrated by the distinguished artist and graphic designer Barry Moser.

Poems for Very, Very Bad Children

Shut Up, You're Fine!

National Book Award finalist Andrew Hudgins offers a meditation on humor, ruminating on the consolations and terrors, delights and discomforts of laughter.

A Clown at Midnight

Janice Whittington

Texas Poet Laureate Walt McDonald has published more than eighteen volumes of poetry. A poet of the landscape, of war and flying, of people just working hard, McDonald is master of the vital image and sound. And his work invites others to define the elements that delight and fascinate. Each contributor herein has made his own trek to McDonald's harsh landscapes of arroyos and hardscrabble, his skies filled with joy and terrors, those night sweats of pilots. Here, in the territory Walt McDonald has claimed, these writers have found gold. Book jacket.

Andrew Hudgins

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