In the Creole Twilight

In the Creole Twilight PDF Author: Joshua Clegg Caffery
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807161551
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 89

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Book Description
"Caffery borrows from the syllabic structures, rhyme schemes, narratives, and settings that characterize Louisiana songs and tales to create new verse"--Dust jacket flap.

In the Creole Twilight

In the Creole Twilight PDF Author: Joshua Clegg Caffery
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807161551
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 89

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Caffery borrows from the syllabic structures, rhyme schemes, narratives, and settings that characterize Louisiana songs and tales to create new verse"--Dust jacket flap.

Naming the Leper

Naming the Leper PDF Author: Christopher Lee Manes
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807173290
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
Between 1919 and 1941, five relatives of Christopher Lee Manes were diagnosed with an illness then referred to as “leprosy” and now known as Hansen’s disease. After their diagnosis, the five Landry siblings were separated from their loved ones and sent to the National Leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana, where they remained in quarantine until their deaths. Drawing on historical documents and imaginative reconstructions, Naming the Leper tells through poetry this family’s haunting story of exile and human suffering. While confined at Carville, the Landry siblings attempted to keep some connection to the outside world by writing letters to family members and other loved ones. Manes incorporates materials from this correspondence, along with medical records, the leprosarium newsletter, and personal interviews, as he crafts poems that reconstruct his relatives’ daily lives at Carville. Although much can only be imagined, their words remain factual and their feelings of loneliness, abandonment, and pain become explicit. Poetry cannot bring Manes’s relatives back to life, nor can it heal wounds nearly a century old, but it can capture the sufferings and traumas caused by disease and exile. As a work of documentary poetry, Naming the Leper demonstrates that a term like “leper,” whether a stigma attached to patients suffering from illness or a word inscribed on the caskets of the deceased, cannot define the lives of individuals or encompass the full extent of their legacies.

Book of No Ledge

Book of No Ledge PDF Author: Nance Van Winckel
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807165409
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
“As usual, it starts with love. I had my heart set on the door-to-door encyclopedia salesboy.” So begins Nance Van Winckel’s latest collection of poetically altered encyclopedia entries that feature a mixture of quirky social satire and absurdist wit. Entries like “The Importance of Mood to Man” use an encyclopedic tone to insist: “Your body is two-thirds water. Mood is one-third body” and “Life and health depend on the mood taken into the body each day.” An anatomic diagram of the nose is accompanied by the promise, “A nose can smell rain coming.” Alongside illustrations of the vestibule, the meatus, and the conchus can be found lines of text like, “As the one you love steps onto / your stoop / a widening wind / underscores the sky’s pummel.” Reminiscent of recent visual-poetic hybrids by such writers as Matthea Harvey and Bianca Stone, Van Winckel’s ground-breaking innovations must be seen to be believed.

In Twilight's Hush

In Twilight's Hush PDF Author: Laurie Stevens
Publisher: Laurie Stevens
ISBN: 0997006838
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Detective Gabriel McRay investigates a cold case from 1988 involving a missing teenager named Nancy Lewicki. Evidence is sparse and Gabriel has no leads. Much to his dismay, a celebrity psychic, Carmen Jenette, hypes the unsolved case on her television show. Gabriel warns Carmen not to interfere. Meanwhile, strange dreams of water and corpses haunt Gabriel's sleep. They unnerve him as he plans his wedding to LA County Medical Examiner, Dr. Ming Li. When the psychic's life is threatened, Gabriel connects the dots back to the missing girl and realizes his cold case is burning hot. Someone doesn't want Nancy found and will kill to keep her hidden.

Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana

Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana PDF Author: Joshua Clegg Caffery
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080715203X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
Alan Lomax's prolific sixty-four-year career as a folklorist and musicologist began with a trip across the South and into the heart of Louisiana's Cajun country during the height of the Great Depression. In 1934, his father John, then curator of the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song, took an eighteen-year-old Alan and a 300-pound aluminum disk recorder into the rice fields of Jennings, along the waterways of New Iberia, and behind the gates of Angola State Penitentiary to collect vestiges of African American and Acadian musical tradition. These recordings now serve as the foundational document of indigenous Louisiana music. Although widely recognized by scholars as a key artifact in the understanding of American vernacular music, most of the recordings by John and Alan Lomax during their expedition across the central-southern fringe of Louisiana were never transcribed or translated, much less studied in depth. This volume presents, for the first time, a comprehensive examination of the 1934 corpus and unveils a multifaceted story of traditional song in one of the country's most culturally dynamic regions. Through his textual and comparative study of the songs contained in the Lomax collection, Joshua Clegg Caffery provides a musical history of Louisiana that extends beyond Cajun music and zydeco to the rural blues, Irish and English folk songs, play-party songs, slave spirituals, and traditional French folk songs that thrived at the time of these recordings. Intimate in its presentation of Louisiana folklife and broad in its historical scope, Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana honors the legacy of John and Alan Lomax by retrieving these musical relics from obscurity and ensuring their understanding and appreciation for generations to come. Includes: Complete transcriptions of the 1934 Lomax field recordings in southwestern Louisiana Side-by-side translations from French to English Photographs from the 1934 field trip and biographical details about the performers

Unquiet Things

Unquiet Things PDF Author: James Davis May
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807162620
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Book Description
Grounded in wonder and fueled by an impulse to praise, the poems in James Davis May's debut collection, Unquiet Things, grapple with skepticism, violence, and death to generate lasting insights into the human experience. With compassion and humor, this second and final volume in Claudia Emerson's Goat Island Poets series exposes the unseen tragedies and rejoices in the small, surprising moments of grace in everyday life. May's poems impart sincere astonishment at the natural world, where experiences of nature serve as "stand-ins, almost, / for grace." His poems seek to transcend cynicism, turning often to the landscapes of North Georgia, his native Pittsburgh, and eastern Europe, as well as to his literary forebears, for guidance. For the poet, no force propels that transcendence more powerfully than love: love for his wife and daughter, love for language, and love for the incomprehensible world that he inhabits. These stylistically varied poems are by turns conversational, earnest, self-deprecating, meditative, and often funny, whether they're discussing grand themes such as love and beauty, or more corporeal subjects like fever and food poisoning. Lyrical and strange, tragic and amusing, Unquiet Things traces an experiential journey in the ordinary world, uncovering joys that span from the lingering memories of childhood to the losses and triumphs of adulthood.

Cajun Literature and Cajun Collective Memory

Cajun Literature and Cajun Collective Memory PDF Author: Mathilde Köstler
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110772779
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 604

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Book Description
How does Cajun literature, emerging in the 1980s, represent the dynamic processes of remembering in Cajun culture? Known for its hybrid constitution and deeply ingrained oral traditions, Cajun culture provides an ideal testing ground for investigating the collective memory of a group. In particular, francophone and anglophone Cajun texts by such writers as Jean Arceneaux, Tim Gautreaux, Jeanne Castille, Zachary Richard, Ron Thibodeaux, Darrell Bourque, and Kirby Jambon reveal not only a shift from an oral to a written tradition. They also show hybrid perspectives on the Cajun collective memory. Based on recurring references to place, the texts also reflect on the (Acadian) past and reveal the innate ability of the Cajuns to adapt through repeated intertextual references. The Cajun collective memory is thus defined by a transnational outlook, a transversality cutting across various ethnic heritages to establish and legitimize a collective identity both amid the linguistic and cultural diversity in Louisiana, and in the face of American mainstream culture. Cajun Literature and Cajun Collective Memory represents the first analysis of the mnemonic strategies Cajun writers use to explore and sustain the Cajun identity and collective memory.

The Red List

The Red List PDF Author: Stephen Cushman
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807156914
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
The "red list" of Stephen Cushman's new volume of poetry is the endangered species register, and the book begins and ends with the bald eagle, a bird that bounded back from the verge of extinction. The volume marks the inevitability of such changes, from danger to safety, from certainty to uncertainty, from joy to sadness and back again. In a single poem that advances through wordplay and association, Cushman meditates on subjects as vast as the earth's fragile ecosystem and as small as the poet's own deflated fantasy of self-importance: "There aren't any jobs for more Jeremiahs." Simultaneously teasing the present and eulogizing what has been lost, Cushman speaks like a Shakespearean jester, freely and foolishly, but with penetrating insight.

Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature

Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature PDF Author: Martin Munro
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1846318548
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature provides readers with an excellent introduction to recent Haitian literature, one of the richest literary traditions in the Americas. Martin Munro focuses on works written after 1946, a period in which exile has become the dominant theme in Haitian literature. Using this notion of Haitian writing as a literature of exile, Munro analyzes key novels by the most important figures of each generation of the past sixty years, including Jacques Stephen Alexis, René Depestre, Émile Ollivier, Dany Laferrière, and Edwidge Danticat.

The Need to Hold Still

The Need to Hold Still PDF Author: Lisel Mueller
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807106709
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry An adventurer, Lisel Mueller pursues the protean possibilities of communication. In Dreiser’s works she finds language solid, “as plain as money, / a workable means of exchange.” More often she experiences exhilaration in the shapes that communication makes possible. In “Talking with Helen,” for example, she re-creates Heller Keller’s flash of discovery when water suddenly became language, the stream that connected time and space, maple leaves and hands. Mueller’s poetry links varying forms: music and discourse, memory and immediacy. Perennial weeds in her title poem recall ancient times and prayerful monks. Musical names—“Teasel / yarrow / goldenrod / wheat / bed straw”—hold the moment still like the echoes of a tolling bell. “I’m trying to make connections,” Lisel Mueller says of her poems, “looking for links between where we have been and where we are going, between the life outside and the life within.”