The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You

ISBN: 1682262901

Author: Stanford, Frank

Condition: New

Frank Stanfords 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, Stanfords 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 epics 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 bards ear and a tricksters 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, Stanfords visionary masterpiece returns, fortified by the editorial precision and contextual care it deserves.