Books published by Louisiana State University Press

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.

Using the innovative methods of the New Louisiana Legal History, Mark Fernandez offers the first comprehensive analysis of the role of the courts in the development of Louisiana's legal system and convincingly argues that the state is actually a representative model of American law and justice.

Based on a rich cache of personal and business records, Curtis Evans's study of Daniel Pratt and his "Yankee" town in the heart of the Deep South challenges the conventional portrayal of the South as a premodern region hostile to industrialization and shows that the South was not so markedly different from the North.

Have campaign finance reform laws actually worked? Is money less influential in electing candidates today than it was thirty years ago when legislation was first enacted? Absolutely not, argues Rodney Smith in this passionately written and provocative book. According to Smith, the laws have had exactly the opposite of their intended effect.

In this lavishly illustrated biography of silversmith and graphic artist William Spratling (1900-1967), Taylor D. Littleton reintroduces one of the most fascinating American expatriates of the early twentieth century. Best known for his revolutionary silver designs, Spratling influenced an entire generation of Mexican and American silversmiths and transformed the tiny village of Taxco into the "Florence of Mexico." Littleton widens the context of Spratling's popular reputation by examining the formative periods in his life and art that preceded his brilliant entrepreneurial experiment in the Las Delicias workshop in Taxco, which left a permanent mark on Mexico's artistic orientation and economic life.Spratling made a fortune manufacturing and designing silver, but his true life's work was to conserve, redeem, and interpret the ancient culture of his adopted country. He explained for North American audiences the paintings of Mexico's modern masters and earned distinction as a learned and early collector of pre-Columbian art. Spratling and his workshop gradually became a visible and culturally attractive link between a steady stream of notable American visitors and the country they wanted to see and experience.Spratling had the rare good fortune to witness his own reputation-as one of the most admired Americans in Mexico-assume legendary status before his death. William Spratling, His Life and Art vividly reconstructs this richly diverse life whose unique aesthetic legacy is but a part of its larger cultural achievement of profoundly influencing Americans' attitudes toward a civilization different from their own.

By 1877 the US imported half of Brazil's coffee exports and 82 percent of Cuba's total exports. Disease, Resistance, and Lies examines the impact of these burgeoning markets on the Atlantic slave trade between these countries from 1808 to 1867, when slave traffic to Cuba ceased.

Throughout his long career, James Applewhite has skillfully navigated the world of science through poetry. His new book makes no exception, fearlessly exploring time and consciousness in relation to the universe as described by Big Bang cosmology - and as experienced by human beings in the everyday world.

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.

Inspired by his own work as a cabinetmaker - defined by the peppery dust from the woodworker planing a walnut board, turning an oak spindle at the lathe, or honing chisels while gazing out a window - Steve Scafidi's poems reveal both the tenuous and the everlasting nature of existence.

The poems in Jay Rogoff's Venera explore varieties of love, both sacred and profane, by drawing from the natural world, personal intimacy, and the human imagination as evoked in biblical narratives and art.

With contributions from leading scholars in the fields of history, legal scholarship, political science, and communications, this revised and updated edition of Freeing the Presses offers an in-depth inquiry into the theory and practice of journalistic freedom.

First published in 1982, James R. McGovern's Anatomy of a Lynching unflinchingly reconstructs the grim events surrounding the death of Claude Neal, one of the estimated three thousand blacks who died at the hands of southern lynch mobs in the six decades between the 1880s and the outbreak of World War II.

Passionately written and perfectly crafted, Anya Krugovoy Silver's poems help us to view life through a different lens. In I Watched You Disappear, she offers meditations on sickness but also celebrations of art, motherhood, and family, as well as a sequence of poems based on the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.

"Anna Journey's poetry is really magical." - David Lynch, director of Blue Velvet and creator of Twin Peaks.

In his moving debut collection, Matt Rasmussen faces the tragedy of his brother's suicide, refusing to focus on the expected pathos, blurring the edge between grief and humour. Destructive and redemptive, Black Aperture opens to the complicated entanglements of mourning.

One of the first women's organisations to "mask" in a Mardi Gras parade, the "Million Dollar Baby Dolls" redefined the New Orleans carnival tradition. Tracing their origins from Storyville brothels to post-Katrina New Orleans, Kim Vaz uncovers the fascinating history of these ladies that strutted their way into a predominantly male establishment.

In her ninth collection of poetry, Kelly Cherry explores the domain of language. Clear and accessible, the poems in The Life and Death of Poetry examine the intricacies and limitations of communication and its ability to help us transcend our world and lives.

From the Mediterranean to the American West, the poems in Ron Smith's new collection move across time and place to find reliable truths through personal observation. Beyond his own experiences Smith draws from the lives of notable and diverse figures.

In her new collection, Earth, Mercy, Mary Rose O'Reilley sifts through the debris of human habitation - pink thong sandals, curlers, broken televisions - looking for a kind of junkyard grace: "Holiness enters again / turquoise fins, and the Cessna's carapace / lifts on its wind."

Sally Van Doren's imaginative new collection offers bold and beguiling poems. Uttered in intense lyrical bursts that reflect the poet's command of language both familiar and strange, the visually dramatic moments gathered here probe the time-honored themes of love and death with candour and intimacy.

William Wenthe's third collection begins in the domestic realm then moves outward in subject and place-to a bird market in Paris, the Jaffa Gate in Old Jerusalem, the Chain Bridge in Budapest-before returning to the familial. The poet recalls his own cherished experiences of fatherhood: rocking his infant daughter in the early morning, lying with her outside on a pink flannel sheet, and watching her joyous reaction to the sight of roses. While actively engaged in the artist's struggle to represent reality, Wenthe draws attention to the particular, to moments and events that seem to exist beyond thoughts and words. In "Uhte," Wenthe reflects on the Old English name for the hour before dawn: "that word / has haunted me-wondering how that hour / had first called forth a need / to be distinguished by a sound." In well-crafted free verse, traditional meter and rhyme, prose poems, and nonce forms, Wenthe meditates on family, language, art, history, and the natural world, striving to find words to capture the richness of life.

David Huddle's latest collection shares intimate and amusing stories as if told by a quirky, usually reticent, great uncle. Blacksnake at the Family Reunion continues Huddle's poetic inquiry into the power of early childhood and family to infuse adulthood with sadness and despair.

In this debut collection, Eyes, Stones, Elana Bell brings her heritage as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors to consider the difficult question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In The Visible, we enter into a surreal landscape "where it is neither day nor night / but both at once," where light becomes an imaginative force that both illuminates and obscures. The illegible draws us closer to the page-the visible revealed, paradoxically, by what we cannot see. Though these formally restrained poems possess an abstract and introspective intensity, Bond grounds them in the everyday. Both vivid and speculative, the chiseled lyrics breathe. In "My Mother's Closet," the pages of medical books become holy and horrendous, "soiled at the corners, the mind's / terrific passages shocked with highlight, / glossed with scratches in a mother's hand."

T.R. Hummer's new and characteristically pyrotechnic collection takes its title from the rare (in English) singular form of the common word "ephemera". In a work of startling originality, the poet presents a meditation on ephemerality from the point of view of the ephemeron itself as it passes, be it the individual, the atom, the particle.

Katherine Soniat contemplates the present through the fragmented lens of history. She swings the reader out across time, to ancient Greece and China, and into the chaos of contemporary war in Serbia and Iraq. The ever-changing point of view disorients, so that ultimately even the daylight overhead seems uncertain.

In Whitethorn, a book of enormous scope and emotional intelligence, Jacqueline Osherow unflinchingly examines the pain of her own personal history and courageously probes the greater mystery of evil and suffering in the world.

Alice Friman's latest collection, Vinculum, roots for deep connections between people, nature, retrospection, and the inevitable biological destiny of the body. Friman's work branches out from the core poem, "The Mythological Cod," to form a trellis of revelations on religion, sex, humour, science, and history.