Böcker utgivna av Louisiana State University Press

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.

Long-lined and often laugh-aloud funny, Kirby's poems are ample steamer trunks into which the poet seems to be able to put just about anything-the heated restlessness of youth, the mixed blessings of self-imposed exile, the settled pleasures of home. As the poet Philip Levine says, "the world that Kirby takes into his imagination and the one that arises from it merge to become a creation like no other, something like the world we inhabit but funnier and more full of wonder and terror. He has evolved a poetic vision that seems able to include anything, and when he lets it sweep him across the face of Europe and America, the results are astonishing." The poems in The House on Boulevard St. were written within earshot of David Kirby's Old World masters, Shakespeare and Dante. From the former, Kirby takes the compositional method of organizing not only the whole book but also each separate section as a dream; from the latter, a three-part scheme that gives the book rough symmetry.

Strategically situated at the gateway to the Mississippi River yet standing atop a former swamp, New Orleans was from the first "impossible but inevitable city." How New Orleans came to be, taking shape between the mutual and often contradictory forces of nature and urban development, is the subject of An Unnatural Metropolis.

With both an entertainer's eye and a social scientist's rigour, Wayne Parent subjects Louisiana's politics to rational and empirical analysis, seeking and finding coherent reasons for the state's history. He resists resorting to vague hand-waving about "exoticism", while bringing to life the juicy stories that illustrate his points.

In the best tradition of southern storytelling, Uke Rivers Delivers features raconteurs as beguiling as the tales they tell. These lyrical, darkly humorous monologues portray a range of denizens of the American South desperately trying to come to grips with their inherited pasts.

Soon after the start of the Civil War, celebrated civil engineer Charles Ellet, Jr, formed the Ram Fleet under US secretary of war Edwin Stanton. Perhaps the most bizarre unit organized by the Union, the rams were shunned by both the army and navy. In this study, Chester Hearn revives the history of this fascinating but forgotten brigade.

With eloquence, grace, and a searching intelligence, Dave Smith illuminates both poems and poets. Believing that "great poetry cannot be divorced from an intimate, organic link to place", he builds a compelling case for the importance of southern poets.

"Carter's poems are utterly unique-wry and quiet and carrying a velvet sledgehammer. Her pitch, her tone, her sly humor is perfectly tuned. This is not just a brilliant first book, it is a brilliant book, period."-Thomas Lux Catherine Carter's first volume of poetry exudes a genuinely classical quality-cool-eyed and clear-eyed, intelligent, unsentimental, self-aware, and witty in the fullest and best sense. Carter takes our evolutionary development in the womb as a departure point for remembering or imagining our links with nonhuman animals, which make us feel both alien and alive. She writes of being "raised by wolves," that "everyone marries into another species," and of "hearing things" in the voices of the rattlesnake plantain or the apple core. With an offbeat, sometimes-gallows humor-the poems' subjects range from roadkill to stingray-human sex to a traffic ticket for avoiding toads on the road-that looks at our connections of blood, home, and exile, The Memory of Gills nonetheless speaks of hope that we belong where we are. "The Memory of Gills is altogether an astonishing, seductive, and finally irresistible book of poems. Carter is a skillful, imaginative, and witty visionary. Here is a poet who hears the voices of the sensate world calling, pleading, cajoling, and although she says, in 'Hearing Things,' 'I don't / know how to answer, what / to say,' don't believe her. She does know. And her poems say what she knows with a zest and inventiveness that no reader will soon forget."-Kathryn Stripling Byer

Records in woman's language the charm and bite of domestic life. Ava Leavell Haymon's poems form a collection of Household Tales, unswerving and unsentimental, serving up the strenuous intimacies, children, meals, pets, roused memories, outrages, and solaces of marriage and family.

These rich, lyrical poems, written by Jane Gentry over ten years, register the resonance between the poet's inner being and the outer world's everyday events. Moments of insight expose the bright bones of the swiftness of time's passage, reminding us to stay attentive.

Universally and repeatedly praised ever since it first appeared in 1983, Modern Baptists is the book that launched novelist James Wilcox's career and debuted the endearingly daft community of Tula Springs, Louisiana. This is a sly, madcap romp that offers readers the gift of abundant laughter.

A spiritual biography wound backwards, spiraling into the world rather than out of it. Though it reflects on the paradoxes of our violent times, Mary Rose O'Reilley's collection hangs on to life like the bee "up to his hips in love" who "will fall asleep in the snow" and "wake up still kissing his flower."

When attorney John Jay Cornelison severely beat Kentucky Superior Court judge Richard Reid in public on April 16, 1884, for allegedly injuring his honour, the event became front-page news. James Klotter crafts a detective story, using historical, medical, legal, and psychological clues to piece together answers to the tragedy that followed.

The only comprehensive account of the Battle of Fort Fisher and the basis for the television documentary Confederate Goliath, Rod Gragg's award-winning book chronicles in detail one of the most dramatic events of the American Civil War.

Takes readers on a dark yet sometimes comic sojourn through the undercurrents of a life suddenly unmoored by grief, and then to the subsequent rise of the spirit to recovery. Tough-minded and intellectual, Judith Harris's poems are also distinguished by brilliant images close to metaphysical.

The scariest sentence in the English language is brief, threatening, and hopeful. It is deceptive, simple, and as common as water: anything is possible. This second collection by Steve Scafidi is haunted by the possible and "the bells of the verb to be" that "ring-a-ding-ding calling us / to the holy dark of this first / warm night of Spring."

Kathryn Stripling Byer in these poems engages the contradictions inherent in the act of coming home. She explores the step-by-step leaving and returning - and finding "home" transformed because of the journey.

These poems record the partly predictable, partly random representative days in a year that inspire wonder at their swiftness. Spurred by the sensation of accelerating days at the turn of the new millennium, James Applewhite explores the interplay of immediate experience and lasting memory, of continuity and change, over time.

The poems in Crooked Run arise from the landscape, people, and history of a small patch of rural northern Virginia that was once Henry Taylor's home. Taylor moves back and forth over several centuries telling the stories of Loudoun County, part of which is watered by Crooked Run.

The debut short-story collection from award-winning fiction writer Nicholas Montemarano. These eleven stories show why Jayne Anne Phillips has called Montemarano "an American stylist capable of redeeming our darkest dreams."

"A wonderfully disorienting title for a wonderfully orienting book. Deeply instructive, entirely delightful."-Henry Taylor The prodigiously imaginative mind and penetrating wit of David R. Slavitt are on full display in his newest collection of poetry that is perhaps his most engaging to date. The title poem begins by fooling around-"With three names like that, it sounds as though his mother is calling him and she's really angry"-but then builds into a shrewd, thoughtful account of the life of the ninth U.S. president. A second long poem offers a fresh and very amusing appraisal of the practice of buying, writing, and sending souvenir postcards. In between this pair, there are shorter pieces impressive in their range and tone and theme (be sure to read "Poem without Even One Word") that dazzle in an already glittering body of work. Slavitt's poems can be playful, even silly, and then astonishingly convert levity into earnest urgency. Dark lines glint with the light of intelligence and mirth, even as artful puns and jokes reveal a rueful aspect. The poet gets older but his work is as graceful as ever, the lovable little boy signaling from inside the sometimes-cranky septuagenarian.

Offers a celebration of the human capacity for adaptation amid the cycles of loss and renewal that characterize our intimate lives. Floyd Skloot mixes dramatic monologue with meditative and narrative verse in poems that explore family experiences, the lives of artists, historical crisis, love, nature, illness, and sudden, unpredictable change.

For years the legend of Buddy Bolden was overshadowed by myths about his music, his reckless lifestyle, and his mental instability. This book overlays the myths with the substance of reality. Interviews with those who knew Bolden and an extensive array of primary sources enliven and inform Donald M. Marquis's absorbing portrait.

A woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. The most personal of Claudia Emerson's poetry collections, Late Wife is both an elegy and a celebration of a rich present informed by a complex past.

On April 24, 1862, Federal gunboats made their way past two Confederate forts to ascend the Mississippi River, and the Union navy captured New Orleans. News of the loss of the City came to Jefferson Davis as an absolute shock. In this study, Chester Hearn examines the decisions, actions, individuals, and events to explain why.

An account of race relations, black response to white discrimination, and the black community behind the walls of segregation in a border town. The title echoes Blyden Jackson's recollection of his childhood in Louisville, where blacks were always aware that there were two very distinct Louisvilles, one of which they were excluded from.

Argues that writers like Cable, Twain, and Faulkner cannot be read exclusively within the context of a nationalistically defined "American" literature, but must also be understood in light of the cultural legacy that French and Spanish colonialism bestowed on the Deep South and the Mississippi River Valley.

The Civil War writings of G. Campbell Brown - cousin, stepson, and staff officer of famed Confederate General Richard S. Ewell - provide a comprehensive account of the major campaigns in the north Virginia theater. Terry Jones gathers these widely scattered but oft-cited primary sources into a deftly edited volume.

Following her critically acclaimed first book of poetry, Judy Jordan here returns to a time in her life when she was homeless and working as a pizza deliverer. She absorbs the life experiences and unmet dreams of her coworkers, the parking lot prostitutes, and the other homeless with whom she shares coffee refills.