The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You

About

Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You is a truly original Southern epic with immense cultural and creative range. Revered by a devoted cult following since it was first published posthumously in 1978, the poem unfolds over more than fifteen thousand lines without stanza breaks or punctuation, creating an unstoppable linguistic flow that mirrors the chaos and beauty it depicts. In this third edition, meticulously edited by James McWilliams and A. P. Walton, Stanford’s sprawling vision is revived not as a lost relic but as a towering work fiercely alive in its ethical and aesthetic extremes.

Beginning with poetry composed in his teens, Stanford worked feverishly in his early twenties to transform and expand fragments into this colossal, labyrinthine poem that captures the terrains of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas circa 1960. A few years later, he helped prepare the poem for its initial publication before ending his brief life at twenty-nine. The Battlefield blends vernacular speech and dream logic, creating a mythic landscape inhabited by Francis, the epic’s twelve-year-old hero—orphan, seer, street hustler—who navigates racial injustice, cinematic visions, and historical collisions with unflinching poetic force, wandering through myth and memory and armed with a bard’s ear and a trickster’s tongue.

A one-of-a-kind outlaw epic, The Battlefield has hidden in the literary shadows for half a century as a mystical artifact. Now, in this first scholarly edition, Stanford’s visionary masterpiece returns, fortified by the editorial precision and contextual care it deserves.

Author

“As John Lee Hooker would put it, Born in Mississippi, Raised up in Tennessee—I would add, Come Into My Own in Arkansas.” Thus did Frank Stanford (1948–78) describe his life less than two years before he died. Largely unrecognized by the poetic establishment, Stanford was a prolific poet with admirers ranging from Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Alan Dugan and Eileen Myles. Although disciplined about his writing, he lived hard and fast, balancing marriages, affairs, alcohol, financial struggles, and mental health issues until he no longer could.

Editors

James McWilliams is the author of The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford. His writing has appeared in Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, Harper’s Magazine, and The Paris Review. A winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, he is professor of history at Texas State University.

A. P. Walton, a poet, studied literature at Lund University, where he authored a seminal thesis on Frank Stanford. He is the editor of Letters of a Poet Dying (2026), the first-ever edition of Stanford’s selected letters.

Praise

“Stanford understood that in the South—and in life itself—humor keeps company with with the deepest mysteries. The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You brings this truth to life more powerfully and convincingly than any other American poem. Above all, it is a jubilee of language. As a child of the land that Stanford writes about, I guarantee you: this here is the real gab of the Delta. And thanks to the extraordinary work of James McWilliams and A. P. Walton, we have at last an authoritative, scholarly edition. McWilliams and Walton are rare scholars—as at home in Stanford’s levee camps as in the archives. For the stellar work they have done, this book’s growing readership will be forever grateful.”
—Greg Brownderville, creator of Fire Bones and author of A Horse with Holes in It