Books published by Louisiana State University Press

In 1925, Essae Martha Culver, a California librarian, arrived in Louisiana to direct a three-year project funded by the Carnegie Corporation that aimed to introduce public libraries to rural populations. This volume chronicles the impressive, colourful history of Louisiana parish libraries and the State Library of Louisiana.

In this enlightening study, Clarence Mohr follows the demise of chattel slavery in one state of the Confederate South. Like the slavery regime itself, Mohr's story is biracial in character, embracing the perspectives of both blacks and whites as they struggled to comprehend the approach of black freedom.

Alice Friman's sharply etched collection of poetry, reminds readers that times of reckoning are marked by blood: the knife, the sword, the cutting word. Blood runs through our history, stories, religion, and art, and we cannot help but play our part by adding to the storm of "fang and claw" and its inherent sorrow.

Offers deeply serious verse that packs profound emotional and spiritual power while encouraging readers to laugh out loud. Catherine Carter's quirky, accessible poems bridge and question binaries - human and nonhuman, lyric and narrative, science and magic, river trash and galaxies.

Prolific poet and novelist David Huddle reflects on turning seventy-six years of age and records his aghast reactions to changes brought about by the current president of the United States. Huddle embraces the potential of poetry to use intelligence, wit, language, knowledge, and sense of form to move toward useful revelations.

Examines the language of slavery, which Niels Eichhorn considers central to revolutionary struggles, especially those waged in Europe in the nineteenth century. Eichhorn begins in 1830 with separatist movements in Greece, Belgium, and Poland, which laid the foundation for rebellions undertaken later in the century.

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.

Kelly Cherry crafts poems that explore the ever-evolving realm of modern physics, confronting the invisibilities and mysteries of the material world. She leverages challenging ideas into a space of contemplative wonder as the book moves from external observation into an increasingly inward space of personal reflection and expression.

In My Lookalike at the Krishna Temple, Jacqueline Osherow considers expressions of spirituality from cultures all over the world and investigates previously unexplored aspects of her relationship to Judaism and Jewish history.

In this powerful collection, Chelsea Rathburn seeks to voice matters once deemed unspeakable, from collisions between children and predators to the realities of postpartum depression. Still Life with Mother and Knife considers the female body, "mute and posable", as object of both art and violence.

Bed is where we sleep and dream, where we make love and give ourselves nightmares. The thirteen stories in Wendy Rawlings's Time for Bed traverse the complicated terrain of bedtime activity, from adulterous couplings to nightmares that come to life, in terms that can feel lurid, unsettling, or disturbingly funny.

Focuses on the immigration of West Indians and Central Americans to New Orleans from the turn of the twentieth century to the start of World War II. Glenn Chambers discerns the methods by which these people of diverse backgrounds integrated into New Orleans society and negotiated their distinct historical and ethnoracial identities.

Brings together scholars of political science, sociology, and mass communication to provide an in-depth analysis of race in the United States through the lens of public policy. This collection outlines how issues such as profiling, wealth inequality, and housing segregation relate to race and policy decisions at both the local and national levels.

The poems of In the Months of My Son's Recovery inhabit the voice and point of view of the mother of a heroin addict who enters recovery. With clear perception and precise emotional tones, Kate Daniels explores recovery experiences from multiple, evolving vantage points.

Meditates on the comings and goings of midlife - births and deaths, losses and gains, despairs and hopes. In poems that range from rigorous formalism to breathless free verse, Shane Seely reaches for instruction, understanding, and comfort. He finds solace in works of art, nature, human relationships, and memory.

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 tradition of second-century writer Pausanias, George Kalogeris offers a series of meditative poems on his Greek heritage, both through the intimate lens of his upbringing and the vast historical view of the country's great literature and philosophy.

This heartwarming story navigates a complicated and frightening event through the lens of a resilient community. Stylized colour photographs provide young children with a visual aid to explain the story and insight into how veterinarians care for animals.

The bravura of David R. Slavitt's first book of poems, published more than fifty years ago, continues to reverberate through his newest collection in a voice matured and roughened by age. Civil Wars encourages contemplation of the world and writing rather than acceptance of the thoughts of the critic.

A panorama of past and contemporary southern society are captured in Bridging Southern Cultures by some of the South's leading historians, anthropologists, literary critics, musicologists, and folklorists. This exciting collection reaches aspects of southern heritage that previous approaches have long obscured.

"I had a clock it woke all day," writes Jonathan Thirkield at the outset of The Waker's Corridor, a book that charts an assiduous attempt to recover lost time. Housed in elaborate and varied formal architectures, these poems navigate the disorder and gaps left by the violence of loss. All measures of time -- psychological, personal, historical, numerical -- collide and overlap in intensely lyrical verse. What results is a journey that winds through shifting lands and interiors, across theatrical stages and city streets, into voices and objects that emerge in sudden, vivid relief, and just as quickly disappear. By turns dreamlike and sternly rational, arcane and contemporary, intimate and dramatic, it is a book of blinding, austere, and beautiful awakenings.

Accepting an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Daniel Hoffman wrote, "Amid private sufferings and outrage at the brutalities of public life, it is gaiety that sustains us, and love, and the imagination's power to create from both deprivation and delight." This collection embodies those emotions and that imaginative power.

In this companion volume to William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, Cleanth Brooks takes an in-depth look at Faulkner's early poetry and prose as well as his five non-Yoknapatawpha novels -- Soldiers Pay, Mosquitoes, Pylon, The Wild Palms, and A Fable. Brooks also offers relevant clarification of some of his earlier interpretations of Faulkner that have been challenged -- most notably in the case of Faulkner that have been challenged -- most notable in the case of Absalom, Absalom!, which he considers Faulkner's greatest novel. Recognizing that the creative and imaginative center of Faulkner's art is Yoknapatawpha County, Brooks examines the merits of each of the works set beyond these boundaries and explores how these writings complement Faulkner as an artist. He sheds light on the literary sources that influenced Faulkner's early work and the technical innovations and general themes Faulkner was to develop in his later writing. The notes and appendixes with which Brooks concludes Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond serve only to amplify this comprehensive study.

New Yorker James Baldwin once declared that a black man can look at a map of the United States, contemplate the area south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and thus scare himself to death. In The Scary Mason-Dixon Line, Trudier Harris explores why black writers have consistently both loved and hated the South.

For sixty years Daniel Hoffman has drawn on a lifetime of experiences to engage readers with his powerful imagination. The poems in Next to Last Words - illuminated by the poet's unique vision and leavened by touches of humour - continue this tradition.

Documents a number of lawsuits challenging various requirements - including literacy tests, poll taxes, and white primaries - designed primarily to strip African American men of their right to vote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In Catherine Carter's The Swamp Monster at Home, classical sirens sing from a Chesapeake Bay island; Adam and his lover, Steve, share beers in Eden; and a Norse goddess strides into an emergency room, "glowing like grain." With quirky imagination and wry humor, Carter exposes the connections between human and nonhuman, blood and home. Building from The Memory of Gills, Carter's debut collection and winner of the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry, these vivid and tender poems consider the immanent and sometimes animistic natural world. The Swamp Monster at Home, however, takes new risks, offering a deeper vulnerability and greater maturity; this new collection acknowledges the loves within and outside of marriage and confesses to both the grief and relief of miscarriage. Varied in form, The Swamp Monster at Home offers accessible and rewarding, elegiac yet hopeful poems -- an exciting new collection from a remarkable writer.

Vaudeville in the Dark is R. M. Ryan's dance to the music of our times, his search for salvation in poetry. In writing up our minor moments, he reckons to find "peace beneath the unsteady light / where we give ourselves to the world / as we circle in and out of the dark." Sometimes funny, sometimes somber, the world of Vaudeville in the Dark ranges from an elegy on the death of a miner in Sago, West Virginia, to a meditation on the life of Rembrandt. Tony the Tiger, Glenn Gould, Chaucer---each has a moment as Ryan makes his way across the stage of our lives. He creates a world both frightening and funny as we -- songsters all -- long for a "heart dissolved in melody."