Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You is a truly original Southern epic with immense cultural and creative range. Revered by a devoted cult following since it was first published posthumously in 1978, the poem unfolds over more than fifteen thousand lines without stanza breaks or punctuation, creating an unstoppable linguistic flow that mirrors the chaos and beauty it depicts. In this third edition, meticulously edited by James McWilliams and A. P. Walton, Stanford’s sprawling vision is revived not as a lost relic but as a towering work fiercely alive in its ethical and aesthetic extremes.

Beginning with poetry composed in his teens, Stanford worked feverishly in his early twenties to transform and expand fragments into this colossal, labyrinthine poem that captures the terrains of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas circa 1960. A few years later, he helped prepare the poem for its initial publication before ending his brief life at twenty-nine. The Battlefield blends vernacular speech and dream logic, creating a mythic landscape inhabited by Francis, the epic’s twelve-year-old hero—orphan, seer, street hustler—who navigates racial injustice, cinematic visions, and historical collisions with unflinching poetic force, wandering through myth and memory and armed with a bard’s ear and a trickster’s tongue.

A one-of-a-kind outlaw epic, The Battlefield has hidden in the literary shadows for half a century as a mystical artifact. Now, in this first scholarly edition, Stanford’s visionary masterpiece returns, fortified by the editorial precision and contextual care it deserves.

Letters of a Poet Dying is a watershed publication—the first collection of correspondence by the virtuosic poet Frank Stanford (1948–78). Born in southeast Mississippi, Stanford lived most of his brief life in northern Arkansas, where he studied, loved, founded a publishing company, and wrote prolifically before ending his life at the age of twenty-nine. These strikingly original letters, postcards, and book inscriptions written in Stanford’s twenties to several dozen recipients—poets, editors, friends, lovers, and family members—illuminate his complicated and often tumultuous creative process.

Enhanced by A. P. Walton’s painstaking scholarship, Stanford’s correspondence reveals a poet intent on crafting and shaping his oeuvre as he approached the death he long anticipated. “I have never feared Death,” he wrote in 1972. For him, “Death was always there, a pale master holding the reins of my horse.” Yet these letters are much more than a contemplation of the poet’s own mortality—they demonstrate a lust for life and contain untold moments of beauty, providing intimate, moving glimpses into Stanford’s creativity, aesthetic beliefs, friendships, romances, and fears.

That these letters have survived obscurity for the many decades since the poet’s death is a small miracle. Stanford’s letters offer a clear window into the genius of one of the most gifted and prodigious poets of the twentieth century and stand in their own right as significant works of literature.