A career-spanning volume drawn from forty years of work and a selection of new poems. Stephen Corey's work is intelligent, moving and engaging. Poem after poem is beautiful, effortless, and thought-provoking. The range of style and subject matter, the depth of thought and emotion, the elegance and resonance and simplicity of language, the affectionate voice and tone-all work to make this a truly important and memorable book. "Here is a life, and a life, and / a life," Stephen Corey writes in the opening poem's instructions to on how find the faded leaf-also a metaphor for the end of life-that one must imagine still colored after he is "gone." The poem is echoed near the end of this stunningly rich and encompassing book in a poem addressed to his four daughters about what he has missed during his life. In between we encounter a world we thought we knew but have not seen in this way before: things as varied as Monarch butterflies, telephones, calligraphy, and bread, as well as other writers and texts that become lenses to show us "How we are growing undoes what we are" and see. Like the glassblower's art in one of these major poems, "Breath makes another world." And like his Michelangelo in a sequence that masterfully covers centuries, we see "the way a life we love can be steered, / beyond our control, beyond us." And so, thanks to this important and needed book we too can live beyond ourselves; that, indeed, is the highest praise for any art." -Richard Jackson, author of Broken Horizons and Where the Wind Comes From "Stephen Corey's, As My Age Then Was, So I Understood Them, is sometimes bookish, in the best ways, and in addition to welcoming many of the stars in our pantheon (Shakespeare, O'Keeffe, Keats, Ginsberg, Woolf, and Whitman for example) there's also the dual elegy for the poet's father and Dickinson (the latter also has her own baseball poem), Emerson 'at the moment of his first masturbation," and a sequence in which Li Po and Tu Fu hop on a jet and tour America. What this means is that when Corey forays into "the real world" -keeping a hospital death watch, exploring and exalting carnal love, or delighting in his young daughter "playing Beethoven on my chest" - the poems are informed by both of his masters... by the "shelves of books" that are "the bones of my brain."" -Albert Goldbarth Stephen Corey worked at the Georgia Review for thirty-six years in various positions including thirteen year as Editor before retiring in 2019. His first two poetry collections, The Last Magician (Water Mark Press, 1981) and Synchronized Swimming (Swallow's Tale Press, 1984), were winners of national competitions. All These Lands You Call One Country (University of Missouri Press, 1992) and There Is No Finished World (White Pine Press, 2003) followed, and a half-dozen poetry chapbooks were interspersed along the way. His first prose collection was Startled at the Big Sound: Essays Personal, Literary, and Cultural (Mercer University Press, 2017), and a second is in process.

In Conscientious Thinking, David Bosworth cuts through all the noise of today's political dysfunction and cultural wars to sound the deeper causes of our discontent. Americans are living, he argues, in a profoundly transitional era, one in which the commonsense beliefs of the first truly modern society are being undermined by the still crude but irreversible forces set loose by technology's drastic revision of our everyday lives. He shows how this disruptive conflict between modern and post-modern modes of reasoning can be found in all advanced fields, including art, medicine, and science, and then traces its impact on our daily actions through such changes as the ways in which friends relate, money is made, crimes are committed, and mates are chosen. Just as feudal values had to give way to a modern worldview that more effectively contained the new social reality generated by the printed book, so must our democracy reimagine itself in ways that can domesticate - civilize rather than merely ""monetize"" - a post-modern scene radically transformed by our digital machines. To that end, Conscientious Thinking supplies not only the means to make sense of our contentious times but also a provisional sketch of what a desirable post-modern America might look like.

What Persists contains eighteen of the nearly fifty essays on poetry that Judith Kitchen published in The Georgia Review over a twenty-five-year span. Coming at the genre from every possible angle, this celebrated critic discusses work by older and younger poets, most American but some foreign, and many of whom were not yet part of the contemporary canon. Her essays reveal a cultural history from the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, through 9/11 and the Iraq War, and move into today's political climate. They chronicle personal interests while they also make note of what was happening in contemporary poetry by revealing overall changes of taste, both in content and in the use of craft. Over time, they fashion a comprehensive overview of the contemporary literary scene. At its best, What Persists shows what a wide range of poetry is being written-by women, men, poets who celebrate their ethnicity, poets who show a fierce individualism, poets whose careers have soared, promising poets whose work has all but disappeared.

What Persists contains eighteen of the nearly fifty essays on poetry that Judith Kitchen published in The Georgia Review over a twenty-five-year span. Coming at the genre from every possible angle, this celebrated critic discusses work by older and younger poets, most American but some foreign, and many of whom were not yet part of the contemporary canon. Her essays reveal a cultural history from the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, through 9/11 and the Iraq War, and move into today's political climate. They chronicle personal interests while they also make note of what was happening in contemporary poetry by revealing overall changes of taste, both in content and in the use of craft. Over time, they fashion a comprehensive overview of the contemporary literary scene. At its best, What Persists shows what a wide range of poetry is being written-by women, men, poets who celebrate their ethnicity, poets who show a fierce individualism, poets whose careers have soared, promising poets whose work has all but disappeared.

Startled at the Big Sound: Essays Personal, Literary, and Cultural is the first prose collection by Stephen Corey, a widely published poet (with ten collections in all) and one of the country's most highly regarded literary editors, who cofounded The Devil's Millhopper in 1977 and has worked with The Georgia Review since 1983. These essays, written across three decades, variously describe, analyze, and meditate upon his concurrent lives as family member, publishing writer, editor for a major literary journal, and cultural-political observer of the broader world within which he has lived while experiencing his smaller realms. In these essays, Corey finds himself unwilling and/or unable to write about a family member without alluding to poetry or other arts, about his editing work without reference to his own writing practice and philosophy, or about his own writing without connecting it to history and society. Whether writing on being a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war, on the death of Roy Orbison, or about an adoption document that comes to America in advance of his new South Korean infant daughter, Stephen Corey finds himself moved to new definitions of his other life's blood, poetry. As the title of one of Stephen Corey's poetry collections states, "There is no finished world," and many of the essays collected here speak to one or both senses of that crucial word "finished": for the artist, there is always the urge to polish the work, to move it one word or brush stroke closer to an ever-elusive perfection; for the human being, there is always the need to argue with inevitable mortality so as to make the most of the life at hand.