Startled at the Big Sound: Essays Personal, Literary, and Cultural is the first prose collection by Stephen Corey. A widely published poet (with 10 collections in all) and one of the country’s most highly regarded literary editors, Corey co-founded The Devil’s Millhopper in 1977 and has worked with The Georgia Review, UGA’s quarterly journal of arts and letters, since 1983.
Written across three decades, the essays in Startled at the Big Sound variously describe, analyze and meditate upon Corey’s concurrent lives as family member, publishing writer, editor for a major literary journal and cultural-political observer of the broader world within which he has lived while experiencing his smaller realms.
In these essays, Corey finds himself unwilling and/or unable to write about a family member without alluding to poetry or other arts, about his editing work without reference to his own writing practice and philosophy or about his own writing without connecting it to history and society.