Books in the Barataria Poetry series

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.

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.

With an astonishing grasp of language and detail, Julia Levine enacts a visceral, lyric experience that slips wildly between and within tragedy and grace. In Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, Levine offers far-ranging subjects, as well as a series of revision poems that question the imagination's infinite possibilities for creation.

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.

A book-length poem addressed to an unborn child lost in miscarriage. Beginning with the hope and promise of springtime, poet Matthew Thorburn traces the course of a year with sections set in each of the four seasons.

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.

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.

Struggling to accept her impending blindness, the speaker in Julia Levine's fifth collection of poetry, Ordinary Psalms, asks everyday life to help her learn how to see beyond appearances into fundamental truths.

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.