Books published by Louisiana State University Press

The unusual voice encountered in Curses and Wishes carries a quiet, slightly elevated conversational tone, which flows from intimate secrets to wider social concerns. The short, simple lines add up to a thoughtful book possessed with lyrical melancholy, a harmony of sadness and joy that sings.

In this striking collection, scraps of the overlooked, and distasteful - a prostitute passed in the street, the speaker's own forgotten dreams, toothless dogs rolling in deer offal - become occasions to meditate on the rich experiences from which we too often turn away.

A quiet tour de force, Chris Bachelder's Abbott Awaits transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, startlingly depicting the intense and poignant challenges of a vulnerable, imaginative father as he lives his everyday American existence.

Years in the making, Stephen Sandy's Overlook gathers themes and occasions that have intrigued the poet throughout his career. This powerful collection explores love and death, success and failure, war and disaster, with appropriate measures of wit and grief.

Anya Krugovoy Silver's debut collection considers the flawed and gaudy flesh as it turns toward a beloved's embrace, toward the surgeon's knife. Her poems both celebrate the sensual world and seek to transcend the body's limitations through encounters with art, memory, and the divine. At once imagistic, lyrical, and meditative, Silver's verse begins in the personal sphere and then looks outward toward the wider human experiences of illness, faith, fear, and love. From chemotherapy to doing laundry, from observation of deformed pussy willows to contemplation of the word "girl," Silver does not shrink from life's "blazonry of loss." Instead, she ultimately affirms the possibility of praise and joy.

Dramatic and lyrical, Allison Amend's first novel, steeped in the history and lore of the Oklahoma Territory, tells an unforgettable multigenerational - and very American - story of Jewish pioneers, their adopted family, and the challenges they face.

Recalls Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in gritty, poignant detail, bearing witness to the destruction of a region and to its recovery. Ranging from the urgent to the reflective, these poems speak not only to the horrors of the immediate disaster, but also to family dynamics in a time of crisis.

First published in 1885 and long out of print, Where Men Only Dare to Go by Royall W. Figg remains a classic memoir of Confederate service. Figg tells the story of Captain William W. Parker's Virginia battery, a significant Confederate unit that participated in every important engagement fought by the Army of Northern Virginia. This updated edition, with a new foreword by historian Robert K. Krick offers a new generation a chance to read the eyewitness report of this bright, observant young soldier who fought through the famous battles in the eastern theater.

An innovative blend of cultural and political history, this is the most complete study to date of the abolition of slavery in New York state. Focusing on public opinion, David Gellman shows New Yorkers engaged in vigorous debates and determined activism as they grappled with the possibility of freeing the state's black population.

Traces the origins and evolution of conjuring practices across the centuries. Though some may see the study of conjure as a perpetuation of old stereotypes that depict blacks as bound to superstition, the truth, Jeffrey Anderson reveals, is far more complex.

How women's efforts to reform public education in postbellum Georgia had the broader effect of reshaping social relations After the upheavals of Reconstruction, white men in Georgia made a concerted effort to restore state government to its antebellum role. Landed and industrial elites supported policies that benefited only themselves and the cotton economy, fiercely opposing any measures that might have limited access to cheap labor or distributed the costs of government more equitably. Alarmed at the growing poverty, illiteracy, class strife, and vulnerability of women, female activists in Georgia advocated a fair and just system of education as a way of providing economic opportunity for women and the rural and urban poor. Their focus on educational reform transfigured private and public social relations in the New South, as Rebecca S. Montgomery details in her expansive new study. Montgomery argues that women's prolonged campaign for educational improvements reflected their concern for distributing public resources more equitably. Middle-class white women in Georgia recognized the crippling effects of discrimination and state inaction, which they came to understand in terms of both gender and class. They subsequently pushed for admission of women to Georgia's state colleges and universities, rural school improvement, home extension services, public kindergartens, child labor reforms, and the establishment of female-run boarding schools in the mountains of North Georgia. In the process, Montgomery explains, a distinct female political culture developed that stood in opposition to the individualism, corruption, and short-sightedness that plagued formal politics in the New South. Though women used the male-dominated state government to mediate between competing interests in their crusade, they also promoted a new concept of manhood in which honor and integrity were based on the obligation to serve family and society. The Politics of Education in the New South provides the first complete picture of women's role in expanding the democratic promise of education in the South and shows how concern about their status as female citizens motivated women to Progressive reform on behalf of others. Rebecca S. Montgomery is an assistant professor of history at Texas State University at San Marcos.

In the summer of 1959, A.J. Liebling, veteran writer for the New Yorker, came to Louisiana to cover a series of bizarre events that began with Governor Earl K. Long's commitment to a mental institution. Captivated by his subject, Liebling remained to write the fascinating yet tragic story of Uncle Earl's final year in politics.

Explains how the radical religiosity of both Flannery O'Connor's and Walker Percy's vision made them so valuable as southern fiction writers and social critics. Via their spiritual and philosophical concerns, these two authors bequeathed a postmodern South of shopping malls and interstates imbued with as much meaning as Appomattox or Yoknapatawpha.

In his newest collection, Bruce Bond transforms the known and the familiar into something surreal and new. With spare, unadorned language, he complicates what it is to be both bound to the world and yet free within that world, the way in which the imagination deepens our engagements and yet offers some measure of distance at the same time.

In The Long Fault, Jay Rogoff explores how the disasters of human history scar the individual psyche and how our creative acts of art and love help us to resist this damage. After opening with Cain launched into exile-"from the good book hurled / out to beget the world"-Rogoff then sweeps us along in his imaginative wanderings, pondering our mortality through the means and powers poetry makes available. The poems explore sacred and secular history, including wars as ancient as Troy and as contemporary as Iraq, and incidents of mass violence from the Middle Ages to modern times. They simultaneously enlist the power of all forms of art as an ally in confronting disaster and helping us proceed.

Examines the aftermath of emancipation in the South and the restructuring of society by which the former slaves gained, beyond their freedom, a new relation to the land they worked on, to the men they worked for, and to the government they lived under.

From poems of memory and family through its extraordinary voyaging sequences "Via Appia" and "To Ithaca", Ron Smith's Moon Road embodies the experiences and some of the more elusive lessons of marriage, fatherhood, teaching, sports, and travel.

Tracing the concept of the open society - one based on the idea of a universal community of mankind - from its origins to the present day, Dante Germino reveals in this study the central role of openness in forming man's perception of himself and his world and presents n important new political theory of the open society.

Anne Pierson Wiese's first collection of poems illuminates the everyday and the lessons to be learned amid life's routines. The poems in Floating City might be called poetry of place, but they simultaneously inhabit a realm in which a mundane physical location or daily exchange can be seen to have human significance beyond the immediate.

Catharine Savage Brosman offers lyrical and narrative poems about the American West and Southwest, from Wyoming to New Mexico to California. She explores three different types of ranges- mountains, grazing ranges, and the scope and spectrum of light, a constant motif.

Long-lined and often laugh-aloud funny, Kirby's poems are ample steamer trunks into which the poet seems to be able to put just about anything-the heated restlessness of youth, the mixed blessings of self-imposed exile, the settled pleasures of home. As the poet Philip Levine says, "the world that Kirby takes into his imagination and the one that arises from it merge to become a creation like no other, something like the world we inhabit but funnier and more full of wonder and terror. He has evolved a poetic vision that seems able to include anything, and when he lets it sweep him across the face of Europe and America, the results are astonishing." The poems in The House on Boulevard St. were written within earshot of David Kirby's Old World masters, Shakespeare and Dante. From the former, Kirby takes the compositional method of organizing not only the whole book but also each separate section as a dream; from the latter, a three-part scheme that gives the book rough symmetry.

Strategically situated at the gateway to the Mississippi River yet standing atop a former swamp, New Orleans was from the first "impossible but inevitable city." How New Orleans came to be, taking shape between the mutual and often contradictory forces of nature and urban development, is the subject of An Unnatural Metropolis.

With both an entertainer's eye and a social scientist's rigour, Wayne Parent subjects Louisiana's politics to rational and empirical analysis, seeking and finding coherent reasons for the state's history. He resists resorting to vague hand-waving about "exoticism", while bringing to life the juicy stories that illustrate his points.

In the best tradition of southern storytelling, Uke Rivers Delivers features raconteurs as beguiling as the tales they tell. These lyrical, darkly humorous monologues portray a range of denizens of the American South desperately trying to come to grips with their inherited pasts.

Soon after the start of the Civil War, celebrated civil engineer Charles Ellet, Jr, formed the Ram Fleet under US secretary of war Edwin Stanton. Perhaps the most bizarre unit organized by the Union, the rams were shunned by both the army and navy. In this study, Chester Hearn revives the history of this fascinating but forgotten brigade.

With eloquence, grace, and a searching intelligence, Dave Smith illuminates both poems and poets. Believing that "great poetry cannot be divorced from an intimate, organic link to place", he builds a compelling case for the importance of southern poets.

"Carter's poems are utterly unique-wry and quiet and carrying a velvet sledgehammer. Her pitch, her tone, her sly humor is perfectly tuned. This is not just a brilliant first book, it is a brilliant book, period."-Thomas Lux Catherine Carter's first volume of poetry exudes a genuinely classical quality-cool-eyed and clear-eyed, intelligent, unsentimental, self-aware, and witty in the fullest and best sense. Carter takes our evolutionary development in the womb as a departure point for remembering or imagining our links with nonhuman animals, which make us feel both alien and alive. She writes of being "raised by wolves," that "everyone marries into another species," and of "hearing things" in the voices of the rattlesnake plantain or the apple core. With an offbeat, sometimes-gallows humor-the poems' subjects range from roadkill to stingray-human sex to a traffic ticket for avoiding toads on the road-that looks at our connections of blood, home, and exile, The Memory of Gills nonetheless speaks of hope that we belong where we are. "The Memory of Gills is altogether an astonishing, seductive, and finally irresistible book of poems. Carter is a skillful, imaginative, and witty visionary. Here is a poet who hears the voices of the sensate world calling, pleading, cajoling, and although she says, in 'Hearing Things,' 'I don't / know how to answer, what / to say,' don't believe her. She does know. And her poems say what she knows with a zest and inventiveness that no reader will soon forget."-Kathryn Stripling Byer

These rich, lyrical poems, written by Jane Gentry over ten years, register the resonance between the poet's inner being and the outer world's everyday events. Moments of insight expose the bright bones of the swiftness of time's passage, reminding us to stay attentive.

Universally and repeatedly praised ever since it first appeared in 1983, Modern Baptists is the book that launched novelist James Wilcox's career and debuted the endearingly daft community of Tula Springs, Louisiana. This is a sly, madcap romp that offers readers the gift of abundant laughter.