Bücher veröffentlicht von Louisiana State University Press

In her new collection, Earth, Mercy, Mary Rose O'Reilley sifts through the debris of human habitation - pink thong sandals, curlers, broken televisions - looking for a kind of junkyard grace: "Holiness enters again / turquoise fins, and the Cessna's carapace / lifts on its wind."

Conjuring numerous voices and characters across oceans and centuries, Faster Than Light explores widely disparate experiences through the lens of traditional poetic forms. This volume contains a selection of Marilyn Nelson's new and uncollected poems as well as work from each of her lyric histories of African American individuals and communities.

Sally Van Doren's imaginative new collection offers bold and beguiling poems. Uttered in intense lyrical bursts that reflect the poet's command of language both familiar and strange, the visually dramatic moments gathered here probe the time-honored themes of love and death with candour and intimacy.

William Wenthe's third collection begins in the domestic realm then moves outward in subject and place-to a bird market in Paris, the Jaffa Gate in Old Jerusalem, the Chain Bridge in Budapest-before returning to the familial. The poet recalls his own cherished experiences of fatherhood: rocking his infant daughter in the early morning, lying with her outside on a pink flannel sheet, and watching her joyous reaction to the sight of roses. While actively engaged in the artist's struggle to represent reality, Wenthe draws attention to the particular, to moments and events that seem to exist beyond thoughts and words. In "Uhte," Wenthe reflects on the Old English name for the hour before dawn: "that word / has haunted me-wondering how that hour / had first called forth a need / to be distinguished by a sound." In well-crafted free verse, traditional meter and rhyme, prose poems, and nonce forms, Wenthe meditates on family, language, art, history, and the natural world, striving to find words to capture the richness of life.

David Huddle's latest collection shares intimate and amusing stories as if told by a quirky, usually reticent, great uncle. Blacksnake at the Family Reunion continues Huddle's poetic inquiry into the power of early childhood and family to infuse adulthood with sadness and despair.

In this debut collection, Eyes, Stones, Elana Bell brings her heritage as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors to consider the difficult question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Daringly realistic and artfully mediated by past and present, Claudia Emerson's Secure the Shadow contains historical pieces as well as poems centering on the deaths of the poet's brother and father. Emerson covers all aspects of the tragedies that, as Keats believed, contribute to our human collective of Soul-making.

In The Visible, we enter into a surreal landscape "where it is neither day nor night / but both at once," where light becomes an imaginative force that both illuminates and obscures. The illegible draws us closer to the page-the visible revealed, paradoxically, by what we cannot see. Though these formally restrained poems possess an abstract and introspective intensity, Bond grounds them in the everyday. Both vivid and speculative, the chiseled lyrics breathe. In "My Mother's Closet," the pages of medical books become holy and horrendous, "soiled at the corners, the mind's / terrific passages shocked with highlight, / glossed with scratches in a mother's hand."

T.R. Hummer's new and characteristically pyrotechnic collection takes its title from the rare (in English) singular form of the common word "ephemera". In a work of startling originality, the poet presents a meditation on ephemerality from the point of view of the ephemeron itself as it passes, be it the individual, the atom, the particle.

Katherine Soniat contemplates the present through the fragmented lens of history. She swings the reader out across time, to ancient Greece and China, and into the chaos of contemporary war in Serbia and Iraq. The ever-changing point of view disorients, so that ultimately even the daylight overhead seems uncertain.

In Whitethorn, a book of enormous scope and emotional intelligence, Jacqueline Osherow unflinchingly examines the pain of her own personal history and courageously probes the greater mystery of evil and suffering in the world.

Alice Friman's latest collection, Vinculum, roots for deep connections between people, nature, retrospection, and the inevitable biological destiny of the body. Friman's work branches out from the core poem, "The Mythological Cod," to form a trellis of revelations on religion, sex, humour, science, and history.

The unusual voice encountered in Curses and Wishes carries a quiet, slightly elevated conversational tone, which flows from intimate secrets to wider social concerns. The short, simple lines add up to a thoughtful book possessed with lyrical melancholy, a harmony of sadness and joy that sings.

In this striking collection, scraps of the overlooked, and distasteful - a prostitute passed in the street, the speaker's own forgotten dreams, toothless dogs rolling in deer offal - become occasions to meditate on the rich experiences from which we too often turn away.

A quiet tour de force, Chris Bachelder's Abbott Awaits transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, startlingly depicting the intense and poignant challenges of a vulnerable, imaginative father as he lives his everyday American existence.

Years in the making, Stephen Sandy's Overlook gathers themes and occasions that have intrigued the poet throughout his career. This powerful collection explores love and death, success and failure, war and disaster, with appropriate measures of wit and grief.

Anya Krugovoy Silver's debut collection considers the flawed and gaudy flesh as it turns toward a beloved's embrace, toward the surgeon's knife. Her poems both celebrate the sensual world and seek to transcend the body's limitations through encounters with art, memory, and the divine. At once imagistic, lyrical, and meditative, Silver's verse begins in the personal sphere and then looks outward toward the wider human experiences of illness, faith, fear, and love. From chemotherapy to doing laundry, from observation of deformed pussy willows to contemplation of the word "girl," Silver does not shrink from life's "blazonry of loss." Instead, she ultimately affirms the possibility of praise and joy.

Born in Virginia circa 1805, Francis Fedric was not unlike thousands of other African Americans who escaped slavery and sought refuge in Britain. Addressed to a British audience, these memoirs constitute a distinctive subgenre of the slave narrative, and an essential continuation of the narrative tradition established Olaudah Equiano and others.

Dramatic and lyrical, Allison Amend's first novel, steeped in the history and lore of the Oklahoma Territory, tells an unforgettable multigenerational - and very American - story of Jewish pioneers, their adopted family, and the challenges they face.

Recalls Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in gritty, poignant detail, bearing witness to the destruction of a region and to its recovery. Ranging from the urgent to the reflective, these poems speak not only to the horrors of the immediate disaster, but also to family dynamics in a time of crisis.

First published in 1885 and long out of print, Where Men Only Dare to Go by Royall W. Figg remains a classic memoir of Confederate service. Figg tells the story of Captain William W. Parker's Virginia battery, a significant Confederate unit that participated in every important engagement fought by the Army of Northern Virginia. This updated edition, with a new foreword by historian Robert K. Krick offers a new generation a chance to read the eyewitness report of this bright, observant young soldier who fought through the famous battles in the eastern theater.

An innovative blend of cultural and political history, this is the most complete study to date of the abolition of slavery in New York state. Focusing on public opinion, David Gellman shows New Yorkers engaged in vigorous debates and determined activism as they grappled with the possibility of freeing the state's black population.

Poet Claudia Emerson begins Figure Studies with a twenty-five-poem lyric sequence called "All Girls School", offering intricate views of a richly imagined boarding school for girls. Whether focused on a lesson, a teacher, or the girls themselves, the poems explore ways girls are "trained" in the broadest sense of the word.

Traces the origins and evolution of conjuring practices across the centuries. Though some may see the study of conjure as a perpetuation of old stereotypes that depict blacks as bound to superstition, the truth, Jeffrey Anderson reveals, is far more complex.

How women's efforts to reform public education in postbellum Georgia had the broader effect of reshaping social relations After the upheavals of Reconstruction, white men in Georgia made a concerted effort to restore state government to its antebellum role. Landed and industrial elites supported policies that benefited only themselves and the cotton economy, fiercely opposing any measures that might have limited access to cheap labor or distributed the costs of government more equitably. Alarmed at the growing poverty, illiteracy, class strife, and vulnerability of women, female activists in Georgia advocated a fair and just system of education as a way of providing economic opportunity for women and the rural and urban poor. Their focus on educational reform transfigured private and public social relations in the New South, as Rebecca S. Montgomery details in her expansive new study. Montgomery argues that women's prolonged campaign for educational improvements reflected their concern for distributing public resources more equitably. Middle-class white women in Georgia recognized the crippling effects of discrimination and state inaction, which they came to understand in terms of both gender and class. They subsequently pushed for admission of women to Georgia's state colleges and universities, rural school improvement, home extension services, public kindergartens, child labor reforms, and the establishment of female-run boarding schools in the mountains of North Georgia. In the process, Montgomery explains, a distinct female political culture developed that stood in opposition to the individualism, corruption, and short-sightedness that plagued formal politics in the New South. Though women used the male-dominated state government to mediate between competing interests in their crusade, they also promoted a new concept of manhood in which honor and integrity were based on the obligation to serve family and society. The Politics of Education in the New South provides the first complete picture of women's role in expanding the democratic promise of education in the South and shows how concern about their status as female citizens motivated women to Progressive reform on behalf of others. Rebecca S. Montgomery is an assistant professor of history at Texas State University at San Marcos.

In the summer of 1959, A.J. Liebling, veteran writer for the New Yorker, came to Louisiana to cover a series of bizarre events that began with Governor Earl K. Long's commitment to a mental institution. Captivated by his subject, Liebling remained to write the fascinating yet tragic story of Uncle Earl's final year in politics.

Explains how the radical religiosity of both Flannery O'Connor's and Walker Percy's vision made them so valuable as southern fiction writers and social critics. Via their spiritual and philosophical concerns, these two authors bequeathed a postmodern South of shopping malls and interstates imbued with as much meaning as Appomattox or Yoknapatawpha.

In his newest collection, Bruce Bond transforms the known and the familiar into something surreal and new. With spare, unadorned language, he complicates what it is to be both bound to the world and yet free within that world, the way in which the imagination deepens our engagements and yet offers some measure of distance at the same time.

In Glory River, David Huddle's poems pit precise observation, extravagant language, and humour against despair in an attempt to find a way to live in a new century in which the values of the past are dissolving and those of the future are frightening.