Books in the Barataria Poetry series

A revelatory collection of poems set in the Gulf South, Carolyn Hembree's For Today chronicles the experience of a woman who becomes a mother shortly after her father's death and struggles to raise her child amid private and public turmoil. Written in closed and nonce forms that give way to the field composition of the maximalist title poem, the work explores grief, rage, and love in a community vulnerable to Anthropocene climate disasters. Through relationships with her daughter, neighbors, friends, ancestors, other poets (living and dead), and the earth, the speaker is freed to accept and celebrate her own perishability.

A book-length sequence of poems, Matthew Thorburn's String tells the story of a teenage boy's experiences in a time of war and its aftermath. He loses his family and friends, his home and the life he knew, but survives to tell his story. Written in the boy's fractured, echoing voice--in lines that are frequently enjambed and use almost no punctuation--String embodies his trauma and confusion in a poetic sequence that is part lullaby, part nightmare, but always a music that is uniquely his.

Drawing on the aid of beings real and imaginary, Our Lady of Bewilderment offers humorous, honest, and intimate poems contemplating life's traumas and joys, filtered through the religion-infused secular traditions of Louisiana.

In lush verse pointed by Cajun language, these poems measure the good that can result from destructive situations, encompassing ecological devastation, maternal deprivation, spiritual poverty, and mania.

In The Grace of Distance, his poignant, far-traveling new collection of poems, Matthew Thorburn explores the ways in which we try to close the distances we experience in modern life, between doubt and faith, between cultures, between ourselves and those we love.

Katie Bickham's dazzling collection resounds with the intensity of new motherhood and confronts the relationship between mothers and their children, as she explores what it means to carry a child. Moving from the mid-1800s to 2017, these finely wrought poems grapple with how war, violence, and enslavement can disrupt our innocence.

Investigates loss and healing, change and permanence, in a hospital trauma center and the eroding landscape of southern Louisiana. The diener himself, the morgue attendant who assists the dead in the interstice between the living world and the world beyond, is the person with whom Martha Serpas most identifies in this collection.