It's Good Weather for Fudge
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It's Good Weather for Fudge

Conversing With Carson McCullers

Sue Brannan Walker

Foreword by Virginia Spencer Carr

Introduction by Carlos Dews

Title Details

Pages: 88

Trim size: 5.500in x 8.500in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 01/01/2017

ISBN: 9-781-5883-8333-4

List Price: $15.95

EPUB

Pub Date: 01/01/2017

ISBN: 9-781-6030-6444-6

List Price: $15.95

Imprint

NewSouth Books

Related Subjects

POETRY / General

Poetry

It's Good Weather for Fudge

Conversing With Carson McCullers

Sue Brannan Walker

Foreword by Virginia Spencer Carr

Introduction by Carlos Dews

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  • Description
  • Reviews
In It’s Good Weather for Fudge: Conversing with Carson McCullers, Sue Walker imagines a friendship and conversation with McCullers as they share memories of two women growing up in the Deep South, McCullers in Georgia and Walker in Alabama. The past becomes the present in this poem that ranges from love and war to sickness and health, fudge and friendship. Its many allusions to the life and works of Carson McCullers make it a kind of poetic biography.
Walker shows expert knowledge of McCullers's canon but diffuses the literary journey with pleasant inroads into the life of the author. Fans of McCullers’s works will want this essential companion piece.

—Mountain Times

It’s Good Weather for Fudge is a brilliantly executed apostrophe in which Sue Walker addresses Carson McCullers as one Southern woman to another, but always in a poetic fashion that delights. I love the way Walker mingles their experiences as Southern women, even the way she objects to McCullers being buried in the North when every Source one should know that her body and soul belong to the South.

—Frederick W. Bassett, author of The Old Stoic Faces in the Mirror: A Life in Poems

Sue Walker's masterful book-length poem—moving freely between lyrical biography and aesthetic meditation—is precisely what we need to help us rediscover, reaffirm the extraordinary life and work of Carson McCullers. In these elegant, searching lines, history becomes celebration and confession becomes artistic triumph. There are two essential Southern voices here. And, as this book is a stunning achievement, we can be grateful for both.

—Carey Scott Wilkerson, author of Threading Stone and Seven Dreams of Falling

The life and work of Carson McCullers—her painful longing, her struggle with her damaged body—echoes in Sue Walker’s imaginative long-form poem, It’s Good Weather for Fudge. Walker’s writing is lyrical, narrative, scholarly, and wise. She identifies with McCullers—both growing up in the South, both studying music, both poets and writers—and then moves beyond her, making a call for fortitude while accepting the impossibility of love, willing the lost hunter’s bones home to the South. A remarkable poem.

—Barbara Henning, author of A Swift Passage

I'm over the moon about this book. It loves you, through its language and depth and daring. Witty, sensual, defiant, celebratory! Don't let the fun fool you. The interweaving of texts makes me think of Eliot's 'Waste Land' technique—here made more accessible, womanized, personalized, and astute about being and nonbeing, time and place, like Virginia Woolf. This is a brilliant book that knows no borders. Go there/come in ... in ... in.

—Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife and Four Spirits

A single book-length poem has to be well-written to maintain the reader's interest. This is one of those books. A child of the South growing up in the 1940s and 1950s will experience flashbacks through poignant memories of a time now gone. A reader's treat!

—Gwinnett Forum

About the Author/Editor

SUE BRANNAN WALKER is professor emerita at the University of South Alabama, where she taught literature and creative writing for thirty-five years. She has served as president of the Alabama Writers Forum, the Alabama State Poetry Society, and the Alabama Writers Conclave and is the editor and publisher of Negative Capability Press. From 2003 to 2012, she was Poet Laureate of Alabama. She has published ten books of poetry, a play, numerous book reviews, and many critical articles. Her book In the Realm of Rivers: Alabama's Mobile-Tensaw Delta, with a foreword by Edward O. Wilson, was published by NewSouth Books in 2005.