The Last Saturday In America

"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  

"The poems in this collection are deeply invested in the rural South, interrogating ideas of masculinity and inheritance.  The straightforward syntax suits the unvarnished subject matter—childhood bullies, Dale Earnhardt, the neighbor shooting snakes with his pistol. The plainspoken is elevated through McManus’s carefully tuned ear and nuanced appreciated for anaphora and sonic density.  You won’t want the sun to set on The Last Saturday in America—it’s a moving, masterful work." —Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs 

“I’ve always been a sucker for folks that have the innate ability to present complex human emotions in a simplified language. Massive ideas reduced to small, palatable portions. As a writer, you’re lucky if you can perform this magic trick once or twice, but this just seems to be how Ray operates. Effortlessly endearing while remaining razor sharp. Calling out the place he’s from while singing its praises at the same time. This dichotomy is the bedrock of effective southern literature and in this collection, Ray makes it look easy.” —BJ Barham, American Aquarium

“This new collection by Ray McManus is the punch of that punchline, an elegy for those boys-that-will-be-boys born into an American South just daring them to bash their brains jumping off bridges and to take blind curves far too fast. These are boys forged by the fires of toxic masculinity, boys that become shift workers fuming in crawl spaces and sand pits, tearing apart block houses and repair shops, men damaged by a deep history of colonial destruction now doing some real damage to others and themselves. These poems never make excuses but do what the best poems dare to do—to bear witness, to say what few have courage to say, and ultimately, to understand. This refusal to turn away is where the necessary work of healing begins, where we can gather those boys in a new kind of light, full of purpose and love.” —Nickole Brown, author of Sister & Fanny Says

"A Southerner himself, McManus approaches this collection from the view of someone both steeped in and appreciative of the region’s cultural touchpoints, while at the same time confronting a realization of the rot those norms can seed in the men it produces. McManus is particularly poignant when drawing lines from within our culture, dominated by media and materialism, to the men who dwell within it...Emotionally resonant and often bravely blunt, McManus takes a great step forward in the collective search for a different path." —Becca Stanek, Southern Review of Books