An Evening with Poet Ray McManus, Author of The Last Saturday in America

The nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center will host an evening with award-winning poet Ray McManus, author of The Last Saturday in America, on Thursday, April 25, at 5:00 p.m., at the Rhett House Inn’s garden (1009 Craven St., Beaufort). This is an outdoor event. Free and open to the public. Books will be available for sale and signing. Please call to reserve your seat in advance: 843-379-7025.

About the book and author
“These are poems about boys listening to men who were once boys who listened to men, the blind leading the blind leading the blind through the dark. Some boys grow up. Some men never do. Ray McManus has chipped away at the pageantry and performance, the stupidity of the lie, the outright futility of it all…. The Last Saturday In America is, ‘a song that pays homage / to a history of work we should’ve done better.’ Here’s hoping one day we do.” —David Joy, author of Those We Thought We Knew, from the introduction

For fans of Americana music and a beer after mowing the lawn, The Last Saturday in America confronts the long shadow of Southern masculinity.

The Last Saturday in America is set in a nation on the precipice of great change. Through examinations of suburban neighbors, bullies, gun violence, and vasectomy appointments, Ray McManus draws a portrait of American masculinity in the face of political division, pandemic, and cultural warfare. McManus’s speaker is caught between the way he was raised and the future he wants to see for who he is raising. He can no longer rely on what he thought he knew, nor does he know what to do about it. The man rendered in these pages is a father, a son, a Southerner. And he is willing to burn it all down and start something new, only to see that the new start he is looking for has been with him the whole time.

Ray McManus is the author of four books of poetry: Punch. (winner of the 2015 Independent Publishers Book Award for Best Book of Poetry in North America), Red Dirt Jesus (selected by Alicia Ostriker for the Marick Press Poetry Prize 2011), and Driving through the country before you are born (winner of the South Carolina Book Prize in 2006), and a chapbook called Left Behind. He is the co-editor for the anthology Found Anew with notable contributors with South Carolina ties. His poems have been published in numerous journals such as Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, and POETRY magazine. He lives in South Carolina where he teaches for USC Sumter and serves as the Writer in Residence for the Columbia Museum of Art.

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