Truman State University Press: 145 books

Master craftsman Richard St. John eloquently illuminates the human condition in surprising and profound ways in this collection of poems. He finds genuine grace in the midst of suffering and despair as well as in mundane moments of daily life. These are powerful poems with clear-eyed empathy and uncanny insight.

The Bus Driver's Threnody brings to poetic life a world literally in transit: the movement of people along its roads and highways facilitated by public transit and the drivers who steer their buses. Focusing on the separate world-within-a-world of the bus—with relationships among riders, between drivers...

At the end of the nineteenth century, the rugged landscape of the Courtois Hills in the Missouri Ozarks was host to an isolated society of tenacious inhabitants, who subsisted almost entirely on the resources of its rich forests. It was this same valuable timber that drew the Missouri Lumber and Mining...

At the age of seven, Loren Schmidtberger was assigned to a beginner's cow—the gentlest cow in the herd and the easiest for a child just beginning to milk. As he learned to milk with the help of the cow, he also learned the art of living from the unforgiving reality of the Dust Bowl years tempered by...

The creativity of the human mind was brilliantly displayed during the Florentine Renaissance when artists, mathematicians, astronomers, apothecaries, architects, and others embraced the interconnectedness of their disciplines. Artists used mathematical perspective in painting and scientific techniques...

The 1909 murder case surrounding the wealthy Swope family of Independence, Missouri, led to the trial of the century in the gothic-era Midwest. This book gathers the facts behind the suspicious fates of the eccentric Colonel, who was the millionaire donor of Kansas Citys Swope Park, as well as his affable...

Presenting the lost year of the overland emigrants in 1848, this volume sheds light on the journey of the men, women, children, and the wagon trains that made the challenging trek from Missouri to Oregon and California. These primary sources, written by seven men and women diarists from different wagon...

This extensive and rich treasure trove of cartoons from Populist newspapers of the 1890s tells the story of one of the most successful third-party movements in American history. The arguments made in these illustrations resonated with late nineteenth-century readers, as evidenced by the continued use...

Naked Heart: A Soldiers Journey to the Front is a powerful statement about the dark and vainglorious side of combat as experienced in World War II by a young private, Harold Pagliaro. His true story is a gripping, authentic account of mens behavior in the face of death on the battlefield. Pagliaro...

In Renaissance Italy a good execution was both public and peaceful—at least in the eyes of authorities. In a feature unique to Italy, the people who prepared a condemned man or woman spiritually and psychologically for execution were not priests or friars, but laymen. This volume includes some of the...

A road trip novel-in-verse, Mutiny Gallery follows a mother and son on an exuberant cross-country journey to outposts of Americana. Fleeing domestic peril, Claire embarks with her young son, Max, on a continental zigzag through psychic and actual states of dislocation, abandon, and absolution. With...

In his second book of poetry, the winner of the 2000 T. S. Eliot Prize, H. L. Hix uses two contrasting poetic sequences. "Orders of Magnitude" defies rationality in favor of invention in the musical sense: producing a short composition that works out a single idea. As in music, the whole composition...

As a boy, Jim McKean understood little about the lives of the women in his family. Perhaps they preferred it that way. Later, marriage brought another group of women and then a daughter brought questions. The answers revealed stories of remarkable women who survived their time and place, creating a legacy...

In December 1495 the Tiber River flooded the city of Rome causing extensive drowning and destruction. When the water finally receded, a rumor began to circulate that a grotesque monstrosity had been discovered in the muddy detritus—the Roman monster. The creature itself is inherently fascinating,...