New Southern Voices Poetry Book Prize winner Acie Clark’s debut collection asks us to lean into conversation.

Acie Clark wants to talk. In his debut collection, Clark reconsiders our relationship to talking about work and the weather. These poems tell the story of a trans man coming into a new literal and figurative voice while finding language for the world around him. In platonic love poems, interfaith self-talk, and images of the queer south, Clark calls contradictions into question and insists on the power of the conjunction and the hyphen. Small Talk works in both lyric and narrative traditions of trans poetics and spiritual writing. 

From a poet Marie Howe once praised as “a stubborn inquisitive mind at work here and a resilient heart,” Small Talk introduces a unique new voice. Through lenses of recovery, birding, caregiving, gospel and semantics, this collection believes in multiplicities, in the seemingly contradicting identities that make us who we are, and that talking to each other might still save us.

In his debut poetry collection, Alabama poet and musician Lee Bains draws on his own experience at the intersection of work and food—the daily ritual of a workday lunch.

Lee Bains’s four albums center what Rolling Stone once called "Southern gospel punk". In Work Lunch, his poems explore the multi-faceted and often contradictory nature of Southern culture and values through the lens of food, whether at a meat-and-three or a McDonald’s. In sprawling, long-form poems, Bains mines subjects of family, the often invisible work of service, and the horrors and comforts of fast food chains. 

A take-out gyro prompts a reflection on religious-nationalist violence, a Cuban sandwich spurs consideration of U.S. imperialism, a value-meal hamburger channels into a cry of solidarity with organized labor, and a drive-through salad elicits an epic rumination on lineage, class, race, gender, memory, and faith. These poems glimpse sandwiches under shade trees, tables full of boisterous coworkers discussing barbecue, and reflective moments at fast-food franchises, all fertile ground for investigating Bains’s home places of Birmingham, Alabama and Atlanta, Georgia, the systems of power that shape life there, and the ways in which ordinary people survive, connect and fight back.

Set in mid-nineties South Texas, Daytona Teddy Riggs follows a has-been high school football star on his quest to become the World’s Strongest Man.

It’s 1996 in Corpus Christi, Texas. Teddy Riggs—call him Daytona—will stop at nothing to win the World’s Strongest Man competition. He spends his days training and downing as many calories as possible. Outcast from his oil-rich family, his main companion is a tape set by self-help guru Pat Dupree that he plays on repeat.

When a Dupree seminar is set to take place in Houston just before a regional qualifying event, Teddy knows the universe is aligning in his favor. But as the seminar approaches, a new relationship with Tammy, a local bodybuilder, brings all his crushing insecurities to the forefront, and he must confront who he really is beneath the muscles.

At once an outrageous comedy, a biting satire of the self-help industry, and an earnest look at the facets of obsession, Buxton’s riotous debut novel chronicles how masculinity, privilege, and mental illness intersect.

New Southern Voices Poetry Book Prize winner Acie Clark’s debut collection asks us to lean into conversation.

Acie Clark wants to talk. In his debut collection, Clark reconsiders our relationship to talking about work and the weather. These poems tell the story of a trans man coming into a new literal and figurative voice while finding language for the world around him. In platonic love poems, interfaith self-talk, and images of the queer south, Clark calls contradictions into question and insists on the power of the conjunction and the hyphen. Small Talk works in both lyric and narrative traditions of trans poetics and spiritual writing. 

From a poet Marie Howe once praised as “a stubborn inquisitive mind at work here and a resilient heart,” Small Talk introduces a unique new voice. Through lenses of recovery, birding, caregiving, gospel and semantics, this collection believes in multiplicities, in the seemingly contradicting identities that make us who we are, and that talking to each other might still save us.

Set in mid-nineties South Texas, Daytona Teddy Riggs follows a has-been high school football star on his quest to become the World’s Strongest Man.

It’s 1996 in Corpus Christi, Texas. Teddy Riggs—call him Daytona—will stop at nothing to win the World’s Strongest Man competition. He spends his days training and downing as many calories as possible. Outcast from his oil-rich family, his main companion is a tape set by self-help guru Pat Dupree that he plays on repeat.

When a Dupree seminar is set to take place in Houston just before a regional qualifying event, Teddy knows the universe is aligning in his favor. But as the seminar approaches, a new relationship with Tammy, a local bodybuilder, brings all his crushing insecurities to the forefront, and he must confront who he really is beneath the muscles.

At once an outrageous comedy, a biting satire of the self-help industry, and an earnest look at the facets of obsession, Buxton’s riotous debut novel chronicles how masculinity, privilege, and mental illness intersect.

In his debut poetry collection, Alabama poet and musician Lee Bains draws on his own experience at the intersection of work and food—the daily ritual of a workday lunch.

Lee Bains’s four albums center what Rolling Stone once called "Southern gospel punk". In Work Lunch, his poems explore the multi-faceted and often contradictory nature of Southern culture and values through the lens of food, whether at a meat-and-three or a McDonald’s. In sprawling, long-form poems, Bains mines subjects of family, the often invisible work of service, and the horrors and comforts of fast food chains. 

A take-out gyro prompts a reflection on religious-nationalist violence, a Cuban sandwich spurs consideration of U.S. imperialism, a value-meal hamburger channels into a cry of solidarity with organized labor, and a drive-through salad elicits an epic rumination on lineage, class, race, gender, memory, and faith. These poems glimpse sandwiches under shade trees, tables full of boisterous coworkers discussing barbecue, and reflective moments at fast-food franchises, all fertile ground for investigating Bains’s home places of Birmingham, Alabama and Atlanta, Georgia, the systems of power that shape life there, and the ways in which ordinary people survive, connect and fight back.