The Last Saturday In America

by Ray McManus

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.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published March 12, 2024

About the author

Ray McManus’s poems and prose have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. His poems can be quirky, sometimes funny, sometimes quite dark, often both at the same time. His first book, ­­Driving Through the Country Before You Are Born, was selected by Southern poet Kate Daniels and published by USC Press in 2007. Since then he has gone on to publish three more books: Left Behind (published by Stepping Stones Press in 2008), Red Dirt Jesus (selected by Alicia Ostriker for the Marick Press Poetry Prize and published by Marick Press in 2011), and Punch. (published by Hub City Press in 2014, and winner of the 2015 Independent Publishers Book Award). McManus also co-edited the anthology Found Anew with USC Press in 2015. His newest collection of poetry The Last Saturday in America was published in 2024 with Hub City Press.

McManus’s books center on the rural and sometimes repressive Southern culture of the Carolinas, and wrestle with the social norms of Southern masculinity, parenthood, and labor where the laughter, or worse silence, of others “is the threat that keeps us moving forward.” There are also repeated themes about the haunting presence of Ireland -- or more precisely, that unreal Ireland of the imagination that exists in family story and immigrant memory. McManus’s work teeters in the space between the narrative of hope and the heroics of failure, which he describes as the space he knows best by growing up working class in rural South Carolina.

Ray McManus earned his MFA in poetry and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of South Carolina. As a Professor of English at the University of South Carolina in Sumter, McManus teaches creative writing, Irish literature, and Southern Literature, and has won many awards for teaching and service. At USC Sumter he is the Chair of the Division of Arts & Letters and the Division of Humanities & Social Sciences, and the former Director of Faculty, Curricula, and Courses for Dual Enrollment.

For over twenty years, McManus has served the community through local and statewide initiatives to bring poetry to citizens of all ages in South Carolina. He is the Writer in Residence at the Columbia Museum of Art where facilities literary arts programming and hosts the podcast ​Binder. in 2000, McManus founded Split P Soup, a creative writing outreach program that places writers in schools and communities in South Carolina. He served 18 years as the director of the creative writing program at the Tri-District Arts Consortium. He has also served two terms on the Board of Governors for the South Carolina Academy of Authors (the last term as chair). His current outreach project is Re:Verse, a teaching initiative that works with teachers and administrators on developing effective strategies for bringing creative writing back to standard education. In 2023, Ray McManus received the Governor's Award for the Arts -- the highest award bestowed in the arts in South Carolina.

​McManus lives in South Carolina with his wife, their three children, and their grandson.

Reviews

[Cheri · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 Stars

This collection is grouped into three sections, preceded by an impressive introduction by David Joy. This offers a glimpse of how McManus, a Southerner, views the things he sees where he lives, the neighbors, politics, division, the changing culture, violence, as well as other topics.

In his introduction, Joy says:
’When I was a child, I constructed a cliff from things unsaid, from images quietly observed. I climbed to the ledge and stood where I believed all boys stand, though looking back, no one told me that was where, and maybe that’s part of the problem.’

‘The Last Saturday in America’ is a wrestling of these questions. 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.’

As with most ‘collections’ I enjoyed some of these more than others, some spoke to me more than others, some are dark, some heartbreaking, but all are worth reading.

We live in a world that is divided politically and culturally. This collection speaks of, and to, these issues.


Pub Date: 12 Mar 2024

Many thanks for the ARC provided by Hub City Press

[Jeremy Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don’t read “Hillbilly Elegy”; read this. Picked up on a whim from the “Local Authors” section of a Greenville, SC, bookstore, and loved every word of it. Poetry set in the rural or suburban South, hitting on themes of poverty, masculinity, religion, and disappointment. Some grim yet amazing lines like, “Because you wreck some days and burn down others, drive into town like a mother-fucker anyway, position the kids to look out the car window, and dare them to witness everything.” But the last line of the opening poem “Wrasslin’” tells you what you’re about to get into: “Because it’s American as fuck, and none of it’s real.”

[Stan Lake · Rating 4 out of 5]

The forward by David Joy was amazing. The poems were eloquently written with a depth that likely will take more than just a cursory reading to fully grasp. McManus wrestles with manhood, fatherhood and all the trappings of living in a changing south. I will definitely have to read this again because many of these were simply over my head. This isn’t an indictment on the author, simply a lack of reading comprehension and experience on my part. The poems were expertly crafted and it’s a good read.

[Jason Ly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I disliked most of the poems that started with "because" in the beginning of each stanza as they got really repetitive real fast (with the exception of "How the West is Won" which is one of the strongest poems in the entire book) overall I did enjoy the book, it was very striking. Strong themes of what it means to be American and the sorta grit, old fashioned nature that entails. I also really liked "Calculus for a Disappearing South", "Boomer", and "Manifest Destiny"

[cody graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

while i feel like you need to both be from the south & born in a very specific time (both of which i’m not), i do feel like i can appreciate some good americana writing regardless. Ray has a way with words & if you’re looking for a new collection of poems to check out, this is a good one.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I dont usually rate books of poetry but there was something about this that really struck hard.

[Andy Killebrew]

some “be a fucking man son” “but daaadddd I don’t know how to be a man” and “I’m trying hard to love this liberated women but my masculinity is fragile” type shit