Books published by Louisiana State University Press

Meeting a local woman at a service project in Appalachia, the narrator of Mike Carson's poem "Muse" hears from her "Those words, iron twang of loss," that "cut soft ideas of beauty out." Carson's lean, spare collection The Keeper's Voice unflinchingly engages those hard ideas of beauty, of goodness.Direct and often colloquial in their language and traditional in their forms -- blank verse, quatrains, sonnets -- the poems' voices arise from a wide range of viewpoints and situations: from an altar boy thawing a frozen gate lock while early Mass goes on without him, to a returning Vietnam veteran who takes up bull riding; from a boy calling cows in the pre-dawn dark, to a narrator providing instructions for teaching crows to talk; from a new cop, a Christian who must shoot to kill in a ghetto bar, to a family discovering the ashes of a stillborn child among a dead sister's belongings. One poem interweaves locker room slogans with phrases from the Requiem Mass for a friend who died playing football; another centers around a single shout from a wife to her husband threatened by an untethered bull.Refreshingly straightforward, yet suffused with weight, maturity, and passion, The Keeper's Voice projects a wise and uncompromising vision.

These eleven essays confront the ongoing problem of defining American and modern - terms that often travel together as they defy periodisation and other boundaries. Reading questions of nationalism and literature against the grain, contributors address the epistemology and history of literary canonization.

Perhaps America's foremost literary stylist and most mordant wit, H.L. Mencken's most engaging writing told about his own life and experiences. In Mencken on Mencken, S.T. Joshi has assembled a hefty collection of the best of Mencken's autobiographical pieces that have not appeared previously in book form.

The sixteen stories in Margaret Luongo's If the Heart Is Lean etch sharp portraits of people in odd and sometimes surreal situations who thus have the opportunity to view their lives from a unique perspective.

Appointed by Abraham Lincoln to the US Supreme Court during the Civil War, Samuel Freeman Miller served on the highest tribunal for twenty-eight tumultuous years. Michael Ross creates a colourful portrait of a passionate man grappling with the difficult legal issues arising from a time of wrenching social and political change.

The complexities of modern politics and international relationships sometimes overwhelm us. Kenneth Thompson here offers clarity to replace obscurity, personal warmth and human values to replace abstractions. His aim is to introduce the ideas of eighteen "men of large and capacious thought" about twentieth-century international relations.

There were thousands of southerners who travelled extensively in the North and who recorded their impressions in letters, articles for the local press, and books. In A Southern Odyssey, John Hope Franklin canvasses the entire field of southern travel and analyses the travellers and their accounts of what they saw in the North.

Deeply researched and deeply felt, this is a poetic reimagining of the first encounters of Europeans and Tahitians during the historic voyages of Captain James Cook. Examining both imperialism and exploration, Holmes illuminates the cultural exchanges, clashes, miscommunications, and friendships that developed during these European sojourns.

Relying most heavily on music and metaphor, syntax and diction, Two Rooms explores the conflicting claims of life and art, world and word, cultural heritage and cultural affinities, through the sacral, erotic, and creative imagination. By the light of these dark lyrics, Constance Merritt searches for a path, a sign, a respite -- perhaps love or death or God or insight, perhaps radical transformation or a simple good night's sleep. In these poems, by turns passionate, sinuous, playful and grave, a deep and abiding trust in "the plain sense of things" and intractable longing for the "lush, desire-transfigured world" meet and wrestle to a dynamic draw

Gayle Graham Yates's hometown sits on the banks of the Chickasawhay River. Like any place, Shubuta (population 650) is inhabited by good people and bad, by virtue and vice. Both a literary memoir and a cultural history, this book chronicles Yates's return to the town in which she first knew goodness and came to recognize immorality.

Employs a comprehensive approach supported by provocative groundbreaking research to explain the difficulties of the past and suggest considerations for the future of Louisiana's Florida Parishes. The book will stand as a model for the emerging field of southern subregional studies.

Born in rural Virginia during Reconstruction, Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) was a central figure in black history and an important American scholar. This important intellectual biography reveals the complex and dedicated individual Woodson was and the lasting significance of his pioneering work in black history.

Offers sharp-witted, deeply felt, and skillfully structured poems. With clear and powerful imagery, these poems reveal an urgent need to rethink the way we interact with each other and the planet. Touching on racism, environmental exploitation, and failed diplomacy, Closson Buck relies on the ability of poetry to enter otherwise hidden territories.

In James Brasfield's Ledger of Crossroads, layered by light and shadow, the crossroads emerge from distinct yet inseparable geographies. Grounded in the sensual world, the poems fuse American and Eastern European landscapes.

Now revised and expanded, this work revisits Cane River's 'forgotten people' and incorporates new findings and insight gleaned across thirty-five years of further research to provide a nuanced portrayal of the lives of Creole slaves and the roles allowed to freed people of colour, tackling race, gender, and slave holding by former slaves.

Winner of the L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award Gifted with a unique and elemental style that goes to the heart of things, often with Zenlike simplicity, Mark Perlberg published four books of poetry over the course of his long and accomplished life. At the time of his death in 2008 he was in the process of putting together Theater of Memory, a collection of his best poems, both published and unpublished, which he saw as the summation of his life's work. His wife, Anna Nessy Perlberg, completed the manuscript and contributed an afterword to the collection. Moving and unpretentious, the poems range from verses about the poet's childhood, including the early death of his father, to pieces in conversation with Chinese poet T'ao Ch'ien, to poignant poems about his grandson. A slowly deflating helium balloon becomes a meditation on aging and the urgency to teach his grandson "to remember in perilous / times to keep something of himself for himself."

In this unique work, twelve prominent Kate Chopin scholars reflect on their parts in the Kate Chopin revival and its impact on their careers. A generation ago, against powerful odds, many of them staked their reputations on the belief - now fully validated - that Chopin is one of America's essential writers.

In 1957, Congress voted to set up the Civil War Centennial Commission. A federally funded agency, the commission's charge was to oversee preparations to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the central event in the Republic's history. Robert Cook recounts the planning, organisation, and ultimate failure of this controversial event.

George Balanchine, one of the twentieth century's foremost choreographers, strove to make music visible through dance. In The Art of Gravity, Jay Rogoff extends this alchemy into poetry, discovering in dancing the secret rhythms of our imaginations and the patterns of our lives.

In this groundbreaking study, Gary Ciuba examines how four of the American South's most probing writers of twentieth-century fiction - Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Walker Percy - expose the roots of violence in southern culture.

A rare, fascinating personality emerges in Donald B. Cole's biography of Amos Kendall (1789-1869), the reputed intellectual engine behind Andrew Jackson's administration and an influential figure in the transformation of young America from an agrarian republic to a capitalist democracy.

In the most extensive work to date on major poets from the mountain South, John Lang takes as his point of departure an oft-quoted remark by Jim Wayne Miller: "Appalachian literature is - and has always been - as decidedly worldly, secular, and profane in its outlook as the [region's] traditional religion appears to be spiritual and otherworldly."

These poems, inclusive of so many perspectives and voices, enter wide sweeps and strong currents of history, not to generalize or point a moral but rather to render moments in the lives of people caught in the effects of time's passing.

Linda Bolton uses six extraordinarily resonant moments in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American history to highlight the ethical challenge that the treatment of Native and African persons presented to the new republic's ideal of freedom. Most daringly, she examines the efficacy of the Declaration of Independence as a revolutionary text.

Examines a wide array of African American novels written during the last half of the twentieth century, demonstrating that religious vision not only informs black literature but also serves as a foundation for black culture generally.

In his first collection of poetry and prose, award-winning fiction writer Richard Bausch proves that he is also an accomplished poet. Penned over a span of many years, the poems in These Extremes deal with a wide variety of subjects. Many focus on Bausch's own family and relationships. In one long, touching poem, "Barbara (1943--1974)," the poet memorializes his oldest sister, who died young. He also offers two prose memory pieces, recollections from his childhood and adolescence. In these brief "essays," Bausch draws loving but unsentimental portraits of his father, mother, and other relatives as he reflects on the sense of belonging that he gained from his family -- something he hopes to pass on to his own children in this violent, chaotic world. In "Back Stories," the center of the book, Bausch effortlessly weaves poems around familiar characters from history, literature, movies, and popular culture -- including Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare's Falstaff, Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Sam, the piano player from Casablanca. Decidedly accessible in form, theme, and expression, These Extremes will surprise and delight lovers of poetry and fans of Bausch's stories and novels.

This journal records the Civil War experiences of a sensitive, well-educated, young southern woman. Kate Stone was twenty when the war began, living with her mother, brothers, and younger sister at Brokenburn, their plantation home in Louisiana. Without pretense and with almost photographic clarity, she portrays the South during its darkest hours.

In Moth, Jane Springer uses shaped poems, prose poems, and poems with unusual structures to soar through time and the natural world. Yet, while her lines are aesthetically playful, she examines serious subjects.