Dawn Watson

This is a story of a ladybug looking for something better but in the end comes to realize that what she had was what she was looking for the whole time.

Four female friends navigate the political turbulence of North Belfast in the late 80s in this extraordinary, evocative verse novel We Play Here is a collection of four poem-stories, taking place in an underdeveloped area of Protestant North Belfast in the summer of 1988, against a background of political turbulence during the Troubles. Written from the perspectives of four female friends in the months between finishing primary school and starting high school, the girls inhabit an eerie, elemental landscape of normalised violence, poverty and neglect. This is a lyrical and graceful evocation of working-class childhood, and a radical approach to girlhood and girl-friendships,in the years before the trappings of gender make themselves strongly known.

Compiled from extant issues of three early newspapers published in Rabun County, Georgia: The Clayton Argus (1894); The Tallulah Falls Spray (1897 - 1898); and The Clayton Tribune (1899). Items extracted include: births, marriages, and deaths; legal and local business advertisements; local and regional news, including comings and goings and community columns; crop and farming news; school and religious events; and much, much more.Includes an extensive index.

In a sequence of poems set in the mountainous Deep South of America, Dawn Watson vividly evokes an ominous landscape of gas stations, jackrabbits and drifting hawks, where copperhead snakes fall out of branches and ‘magnolia cones / thum[p] the roofs’ of wooden outhouses. These poems, based on the writer’s time spent in Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas, are interwoven with pieces set in the poet’s native Belfast which speak urgently to the raw realities of sexuality, juvenile detention, and the Irish border. Many poems feature speakers driving from place to place, capturing the in-between states in which so much of experience is actually lived. Precise and strange images coalesce into physical and interior landscapes. Alternately surreal and direct, and always joyously inventive, Watson offers a clear and unsettling vision of what is and isn’t there in these anxious, contemporary times.

In December, 1817, the Georgia state legislature enacted legislation requiring all persons introducing slaves into the state to register with a local county court. Clerks in several counties created independent registers in which to record the resulting affidavits. While these affidavits are often overlooked by researchers, they generally include personal, identifying information about the deponents and the individual slaves that could be useful to genealogists and historians.This new volume contains abstracts of slave importation affidavit registers for nine of the ten Georgia counties where such registers are known to be extant: Camden County, Columbia County, Elbert County, Franklin County, Jackson County, Jasper County, Morgan County, Pulaski County, and Wilkes County. Two indexes make the text easy to search and use.