In the mythical town of Winesburg, Indiana, there lives a cleaning lady who can conjure up the ghost of Billy Sunday, a lascivious holy man with an unusual fetish and a burgeoning flock, a park custodian who collects the scat left by aliens, and a night janitor learning to live with life's mysteries, including the zombies in the cafeteria. Winesburg, Indiana, is a town full of stories of plans made and destroyed, of births and unexpected deaths, of remembered pasts and unexplored presents told to the reader by as interesting a cast of characters as one is likely to find in small town America. Brought to life by a lively group of Indiana writers, Winesburg, Indiana, is a place to discover something of what it means to be alive in our hyperactive century from stories that are deeply human, sometimes melancholy, and often damned funny.

Texas Poet Laureate Walt McDonald has published more than eighteen volumes of award-winning 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 he is a poet whose work invites writers such as these gathered here to find and define the elements that delight and fascinate. Each contributor to this volume has followed his own trek of discovery in McDonald's harsh landscapes of arroyos and hardscrabble, in his skies filled with joy and terrors, in those night sweats of pilots. Here, in the territory Walt McDonald has claimed, these writers have found gold. Their essays analyze McDonald's writings about war and the veteran's return to civilian life, the regional grounding of his far-reaching verities, and the writer himself. Some discuss his aesthetic strategies; others examine McDonald in relation to other writers. Still others explore the religious imagery, thought, and implications of McDonald's poetry. One looks at the poet within the context of his fiction, A Band of Brothers, McDonald's elegiac and only collection of short stories. Concluding the study is an interview with McDonald. " His] is the voice of Texas, a landscape that has inspired countless pages of fine prose, but had lacked its defining poet before McDonald, with what seems in retrospect like astonishing ease, filled the role." from Andrew Hudgins's introduction "What McDonald does--has always done--is to offer a modest proposal for stemming what he eloquently depicts as an unconscionable moment in life. He knows that the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, so he pleads for a sort of cosmic compassion, even if the compassion is unearned and the cosmos fundamentally merciless." --Jerry Bradley

"Recklessness and rigor, in equal measure, mark the stirring poetics of Andrew Hudgins in this fine new book. Hudgins can wrestle a rhyme scheme into submission with one hand tied behind his back and can penetrate the black heart of history with a single, subtly rendered detail. He laughs with Democritus and weeps with Heraclitus and, line by distillate line, contrives a tonic antidote to "the acetone / of American inattention." -- Linda Gregerson
In A Clown at Midnight Andrew Hudgins offers a meditation on humor with a refreshing poignancy and cutting wit. He touches on love and nature, but at its core this collection is about the consolations and terrors, the delights and discomforts, of laughter, taking its title from a quote by Lon Chaney Sr.: "The essence of true horror is a clown at midnight." Skillfully probing paradoxes, Hudgins conjures the titular clown: "Down these mean streets a bad joke walks alone / bruised head held low, chin tucked in tight, eyes down / defiant. He laughs and it turns to a moan." Hudgins gives us utter honesty and accessible verse, exploring moments both uncomfortable and satirical while probing the impulse to confront life's most demanding trials with laughter.
"Hudgins's poems are often funny, hinging on a joke or wisecrack or malapropism, but human nature red in tooth and claw has always been his greatest theme." -- "BookPage"

Andrew Hudgins imagines himself in the life of a now largely forgotten poet, Sidney Lanier, who served as a soldier for the Confederacy.