A Mississippi Trilogy: A Poetic Saga of the Modern South

With A Mississippi Trilogy, Brodsky brings together his three previous books that capture a "Northern outlander"'s forays into the Deep South. In Book One, Mississippi Vistas, the outlander passionately explores Mississippi's William Faulkner country, encountering the ghosts of Faulkner's characters and struggling with his own desires and failures. In Book Two, Disappearing in Mississippi Latitudes, he attempts to come to terms with the lingering vestiges of the Old South's gentility and its tenacious racism and poverty. In Book Three, Mistress Mississippi, the outlander realizes he can't escape his self-destructive ways or the lure of Mississippi, which he metaphorically transforms into his "Mistress Mississippi." Praised by such literary Malcolm Cowley and Robert Penn Warren, A Mississippi Trilogy stands as one of Brodsky's true masterpieces.