The late John Beecher, though descended from the abolitionist Beechers, grew up in Birmingham, where his father was a steel industry executive. Beecher himself was groomed for a similar role, but when he went into the mills as a young man during the Great Depression, he rebelled and began to write powerful, radical, activist poetry. A contemporary of Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck, he became a similar chronicler of the massive human displacement of the economic upheaval of the 1930s. During World War II, he served as an officer of the interracial crew of the troop transport Booker T. Washington, and wrote a book about those experiences. In the McCarthy era, he was blacklisted. And in the civil rights era, he turned his attention to the evils of segregation and the Ku Klux Klan. Always, he wrote powerful, spare verse which in lesser hands might have been ruined by its outrage. With his artist wife, Barbara, he published several elegant collections of his poetry on his own hand-set letterpress. His books included Report to the Stockholders, To Live and Die in Dixie, In Egypt Land, and a 1974 Macmillan edition of collected poems. All are out of print.

By the close of the twentieth century, the brilliant poets that had emerged from the Americas included Ruben Dario, Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Vicente Huidobro, and Octavio Paz. To this list must be added Jorge Carrera Andrade, an Ecuadorian, who spent his entire adult life traveling as a diplomat, politician, and poet. Despite a brief flurry of attention generated in the United States by his book, Secret Country (New York: MacMillan, 1946), published just after he served as Ecuadorian Consul General to the United States in San Francisco, Andrade has since been forgotten by American anthologists and literary critics. But in fact the late Andrade was a leading figure in Latin American letters. This volume of his poetry was selected and translated by Steven Ford Brown and is presented in both Spanish and English.

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.

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.