Startled at the Big Sound: Essays Personal, Literary, and Cultural

Stephen Corey

ISBN 10: 0881466174 / ISBN 13: 9780881466171

Published by Mercer University Press, 2017

About this Item

new copies no faults.tartled 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.

Seller Inventory # 103407

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Startled at the Big Sound: Essays Personal, Literary, and Cultural
• Publisher: Mercer University Press
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0881466174
• ISBN 13: 9780881466171
• Binding: Hardback
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Stephen Corey is the author of four full-length poetry collections, among them There is no Finished World (White Pine Press), and six chapbooks. His poems and essays have appeared in dozens of periodicals, and he has coedited four anthologies, most recently Stories Wanting Only To Be Heard: Selected Fiction From Six Decades Of The Georgia Review. Born in Buffalo, New York, and reared in nearby Jamestown, Corey is editor of The Georgia Review, where he has worked since 1983.