Publications

Red Dirt Jesus

Ray McManus’s third collection of poetry titled Red Dirt Jesus won the first annual Marick Press Poetry Prize for 2010, and it will be published March 2011! The judge for this year’s competition was Alicia Ostriker. Ostriker, author of 11 books of poetry, is a major American poet and critic who has been twice nominated for a National Book Award.

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Driving through the Country before You Are Born

University of South Carolina Press, April 2007

Winner of the 2006 South Carolina Poetry Book Prize

Dark poems struggling to reconcile a haunting loss and troubled present.

Selected by Kate Daniels as the winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, Driving through the Country before You Are Born is the first collection of poetry from Ray McManus. The speaker in these poems searches for redemption and solace while navigating from a traumatic loss in the past to a present fraught with violence and self-destruction. The volume chronicles his attempt to glean some measure of forgiveness through acceptance of his own responsibly for his circumstances. The reader is called on to witness family stories without happy endings, landscapes on the verge of collapse, and prophetic visions of horrors yet to come. From these haunting visions, the only viable salvation is rooted in hope that, out of the ruins, there remains the possibility of a fresh beginning.

Left Behind

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To say the poems in Ray McManus' Left Behind are religious would be true, but here religion is sifted down through the most basic of human impulses, to imbue the mundane with the sublime; to hope that from this, something sacred will come. These are tightly honed poems; lean and efficient; a balling of intellectual muscle that will repeatedly explode with flashes of genius. Here, the post-modern South allows Christ to dialogue with Josey Wales, and not seem sacrilegious in doing so. The voice is fresh and distinctive, one that is marked by a formal clarity and mastery and a complex instinct for the absurd:

Religion will remind us that there is safety in fear— a parable of a simple man who sows one narrow row at a time, spits on the blood of his donkey and watches it sink in the sand, only to hide his face in the corn stalks. But small stones in the sun tell the stories of how everything unwilling to change will die, how everything that changes dies a little.
(from "Rapture")

- Kwame Dawes, Series Editor, Columbia, SC

“Gospel as Acid Reflux”

The Asheville Poetry Review, Fall/Winter 2008

“Harvest”

Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Fall/Winter 2008

SC Poetry Anthology

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"The Southern Poetry Anthology Volume I: South Carolina includes seventy-six contemporary poets with original, energetic and unmistakable voices who have called the Palmetto state home. Shadowed and illumined by South Carolina's complex and rich heritage dating from 1514, when Spaniards explored the state's coast, this collection will enrich contemporary American life because selections reflect the multifaceted character of the state that has played a major role in events that have shaped our nation." - Vivian Shipley "For anyone who thinks that poetry stopped in South Carolina after Henry Timrod and Paul Hamilton Hayne or, for that matter, even James Dickey, this generous and well-selected anthology of poems by poets who were born or lived in that state will prove to be a real eye-opener. These pages are full of those quiet recognitions, startling surprises, and sudden revelations of truth that only the best poetry can provide. I read it with the same kind of excitement that a good novel can provide, and I urge it upon all those readers who need to know (or who already know) that poetry is alive and well and flourishing in the Palmetto State." - R. H. W. Dillard"