Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South

Daniel Cross Turner is an assistant professor of English at Coastal Carolina University. His articles, which focus on regional definition in national and global contexts and on aesthetic forms' potential to record historical transitions, appear in edited collections as well as journals including Genre, Mosaic, the Southern Literary Journal, the Southern Quarterly, and the Mississippi Quarterly.

"Daniel Cross Turner has made a key contribution to the critical study and appreciation of the diverse field of contemporary Southern poetics. "Southern Crossings" crosses a gulf in contemporary poetry criticism while using the idea--or ideas, many and contrary--of "Southernness" to appraise poetries created from the profuse, tangled histories of the region. Turner's close readings are dynamic, even lyrical. He offers a new understanding of rhythm's central place in contemporary poetry while considering the work of fifteen poets. Through his focus on varied yet interwoven forms of cultural memory, Turner also shows that memory is not, in fact, passé. The way we remember has as much to say about our present as our past: memory is living, shifting, culturally formed and framed. This is a valuable and important book that entwines new visions of poetic forms with forms of regional remembrance and identity."--Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Native Guard: Poems