Hub City Press to publish Ray McManus's next poetry collection

Hub City Press is proud to announce it will publish Ray McManus's next poetry collection, The Last Saturday in America, in the spring of 2024. Hub City Press previously published McManus's Punch.

The Last Saturday in America is a collection of poems challenging the narrative construction of a singular, Southern masculinity through examination of artifacts from the past (museums and reproduction), the present (neighbors and commercials), and the future (home improvement and self-preservation). The book begins a journey that revolves around the idea of Saturday: the day that ends the week, the day for improvements to yard and home and self, the day to rest, the preferred day to hunt vampires. In the resulting reconciliation and redemption, the cut-down, flooded-out past and present no longer serve as a cornerstone for the masculine; rather, they become plowed-under for a new foundation to build a more inclusive masculinity that is more fitting for a worthy survival in a new world.

Ray McManus is the author of three books of poetry: Punch. (published by Hub City Press in 2014, and winner of the 2015 Independent Publishers Book Award for Poetry), Red Dirt Jesus (selected by Alicia Ostriker for the Marick Press Poetry Prize and published by Marick Press in 2011), and Driving through the country before you are born (winner of the South Carolina Book Prize in 2006). Ray is co-editor for the anthology Found Anew. His poems have been published in numerous journals such as Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, POETRY, and Birmingham Poetry Review. Ray is a professor of English at the University of South Carolina Sumter where he teaches Southern Literature, Irish Literature, and creative writing, and he is the Writer in Residence at the Columbia Museum of Art. For more information about Ray, check out his website: www.raymcmanuspoetry.com.