Böcker utgivna av Louisiana State University Press

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.

In The Long Fault, Jay Rogoff explores how the disasters of human history scar the individual psyche and how our creative acts of art and love help us to resist this damage. After opening with Cain launched into exile-"from the good book hurled / out to beget the world"-Rogoff then sweeps us along in his imaginative wanderings, pondering our mortality through the means and powers poetry makes available. The poems explore sacred and secular history, including wars as ancient as Troy and as contemporary as Iraq, and incidents of mass violence from the Middle Ages to modern times. They simultaneously enlist the power of all forms of art as an ally in confronting disaster and helping us proceed.

Examines the aftermath of emancipation in the South and the restructuring of society by which the former slaves gained, beyond their freedom, a new relation to the land they worked on, to the men they worked for, and to the government they lived under.

From poems of memory and family through its extraordinary voyaging sequences "Via Appia" and "To Ithaca", Ron Smith's Moon Road embodies the experiences and some of the more elusive lessons of marriage, fatherhood, teaching, sports, and travel.

Tracing the concept of the open society - one based on the idea of a universal community of mankind - from its origins to the present day, Dante Germino reveals in this study the central role of openness in forming man's perception of himself and his world and presents n important new political theory of the open society.

Anne Pierson Wiese's first collection of poems illuminates the everyday and the lessons to be learned amid life's routines. The poems in Floating City might be called poetry of place, but they simultaneously inhabit a realm in which a mundane physical location or daily exchange can be seen to have human significance beyond the immediate.

Catharine Savage Brosman offers lyrical and narrative poems about the American West and Southwest, from Wyoming to New Mexico to California. She explores three different types of ranges- mountains, grazing ranges, and the scope and spectrum of light, a constant motif.