Description
From poet George Looney comes a new short story collection that explores the essential nature of faith while plumbing the gritty secrets of the human heart. With swamps, alligators, revival tents, faith healers, sex, death, guilt, sin and snakes, Looney leads us through a dark landscape brimming with the miraculous and the peculiar alike. A man from a fire shows up on someone's doorstep, covered in ash and barely alive. One man's actions make an entire town question its own violence. A healer is bitten in half by an alligator as a crowd looks on. Dripping with Southern gothic, The Visibility of Things Long Submerged gazes at the obscure and obscene. Densely populated with characters that know intimately the trials of life and the restorative powers of love, these stories are filled with a deep longing for something beyond the restless disquiet.
About the Author
George Looney is the author of three previous award-winning fiction collections--a novella, Hymn of Ash, a novel, Report from a Place of Burning, and a story collection, The Worst May Be Over--as well as thirteen collections of poetry, several of which won national awards. And he has edited the forthcoming posthumous book, The Ceremony of Opening the Mouth: The Poetry and Prose of Douglas Smith, to be published by Hermit Feathers Press of North Carolina. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State Erie, where he founded a BFA in Creative Writing Program which he chaired for over ten years, and where he is Editor of the international literary journal Lake Effect. He also serves as Translation Editor of Mid-American Review, which he was Editor-in-Chief of in the 1990s. He has a BFA in Art Education from the University of Cincinnati, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University. In addition to Penn State Erie, where he has taught for the last twenty-three years, he has taught at Bowling Green State University, where he revised the BFA program which he was in charge of for several years, and at several colleges and universities in Chicago: Columbia College, Loyola University, and Roosevelt University.
