Family Traditions

Dear Flora Mae & Other Stories

Breadbasket with the Blues The American Farmer Series

Home Valley Five Heartland Prose Writers

Seven Buffaloes Press Overview

The Black Jack Anthology Series is fine bound and features rural and working class American short stories and poetry, photographs, and pen and ink drawings. To name a few of the themes showcased in the eight volumes still in print are Nebraska Farmland poets; Hard Times and Long Hauls; The Sweating Professions; The Ozarks; Grandfathers; Okies and Oklahoma; The Dakotas; Family Traditions; a tribute to the Depression poet Patricia Elliott; Forgotten Places Remembered; The American Hobo; and Three Poets: Dean Phelps, Gary Allen Kizer, and Leo Connellan.

The Valley Grapevine Anthology Series(five volumes in print) features rural, migrant, valley towns and cities, the Okie Dustbowl era, and working class literature and poems from farms, ranches, and oil fields within Central California, which includes the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys. Also available are individual author collections by Gerald Haslam, William Rintoul, Richard Dokey, Art Coelho, Mas Masumoto, and Dorothy Rose.

The Southern Appalachian Mountains Book Series features titles in print by Jim Wayne Miller, Patricia Shirley, Rita Sims Quillen, and Ed Davis. Unfortunately all three anthologies in the Hill and Holler Series are out of print.

Volume Two of the American Farmer anthology series, Breadbasket With the Blues collected stories and poems, photographs and pen and ink work. It has special regional features on The Farm Crisis, The Southern Appalachian Farmer, Hog Killings and Hard Times, The American Rancher, Getting the Lay of the Land, and The San Joaquin Valley Revisited.

Seven Buffaloes Press Back Pages

Besides rural and working class literature, Seven Buffaloes Press published books on short humorous prose, a satirical Briar poem, the American Indian, the open road, Nam Combat Action poetry, and the Azorean Portuguese-American book Series. The late Patricia Elliott's collection, Here's to High Heels-her Great Depression and Canadian prairie poems in my estimation is a classic.

Poem by Patricia Elliott:

Here’s To High Heels

Here’s to the high heels I’m wearing
and here’s to all the high heels I’ve worn—
clean out my closets
from here to Saskatchewan,
enough spiked heels
to provide harrows
for every tired old farm
that failed and tried,
and failed again
in the kingdom of Russian thistle
and burnt out wives.

Here’s to all the others
who dance in high-heeled shoes
(not many of us left)
Betty Grable died today,
she of the most beautiful legs
that continued on up
where her hips should be,
pillars of black lace,
frilled roofing—
startled moons where her eyebrows
sang.

Rent us a dance hall
with strenuous floor
over the garage
with red wire gas pumps—
we’ll sweat up January for you
we’ll smear on lipstick
six times before intermission,
pat on powder through fences
of conversation,
we’ll hold the music wide and blowzy
to spill out the years,
side-swipe all bondage
wilder than youth
to catch,
reconstruct dreams
in fly-specked corners.
Oh bury us soggy at five a.m.,
heaped up high
on a hobble of memory,
legacies of fatty hearts,
sideroads
to heaven, and Gary Cooper.

Patricia Elliott

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