Books published by Louisiana State University Press

A spiritual biography wound backwards, spiraling into the world rather than out of it. Though it reflects on the paradoxes of our violent times, Mary Rose O'Reilley's collection hangs on to life like the bee "up to his hips in love" who "will fall asleep in the snow" and "wake up still kissing his flower."

When attorney John Jay Cornelison severely beat Kentucky Superior Court judge Richard Reid in public on April 16, 1884, for allegedly injuring his honour, the event became front-page news. James Klotter crafts a detective story, using historical, medical, legal, and psychological clues to piece together answers to the tragedy that followed.

The only comprehensive account of the Battle of Fort Fisher and the basis for the television documentary Confederate Goliath, Rod Gragg's award-winning book chronicles in detail one of the most dramatic events of the American Civil War.

Takes readers on a dark yet sometimes comic sojourn through the undercurrents of a life suddenly unmoored by grief, and then to the subsequent rise of the spirit to recovery. Tough-minded and intellectual, Judith Harris's poems are also distinguished by brilliant images close to metaphysical.

The scariest sentence in the English language is brief, threatening, and hopeful. It is deceptive, simple, and as common as water: anything is possible. This second collection by Steve Scafidi is haunted by the possible and "the bells of the verb to be" that "ring-a-ding-ding calling us / to the holy dark of this first / warm night of Spring."

Kathryn Stripling Byer in these poems engages the contradictions inherent in the act of coming home. She explores the step-by-step leaving and returning - and finding "home" transformed because of the journey.

These poems record the partly predictable, partly random representative days in a year that inspire wonder at their swiftness. Spurred by the sensation of accelerating days at the turn of the new millennium, James Applewhite explores the interplay of immediate experience and lasting memory, of continuity and change, over time.

The poems in Crooked Run arise from the landscape, people, and history of a small patch of rural northern Virginia that was once Henry Taylor's home. Taylor moves back and forth over several centuries telling the stories of Loudoun County, part of which is watered by Crooked Run.

The debut short-story collection from award-winning fiction writer Nicholas Montemarano. These eleven stories show why Jayne Anne Phillips has called Montemarano "an American stylist capable of redeeming our darkest dreams."

"A wonderfully disorienting title for a wonderfully orienting book. Deeply instructive, entirely delightful."-Henry Taylor The prodigiously imaginative mind and penetrating wit of David R. Slavitt are on full display in his newest collection of poetry that is perhaps his most engaging to date. The title poem begins by fooling around-"With three names like that, it sounds as though his mother is calling him and she's really angry"-but then builds into a shrewd, thoughtful account of the life of the ninth U.S. president. A second long poem offers a fresh and very amusing appraisal of the practice of buying, writing, and sending souvenir postcards. In between this pair, there are shorter pieces impressive in their range and tone and theme (be sure to read "Poem without Even One Word") that dazzle in an already glittering body of work. Slavitt's poems can be playful, even silly, and then astonishingly convert levity into earnest urgency. Dark lines glint with the light of intelligence and mirth, even as artful puns and jokes reveal a rueful aspect. The poet gets older but his work is as graceful as ever, the lovable little boy signaling from inside the sometimes-cranky septuagenarian.

Offers a celebration of the human capacity for adaptation amid the cycles of loss and renewal that characterize our intimate lives. Floyd Skloot mixes dramatic monologue with meditative and narrative verse in poems that explore family experiences, the lives of artists, historical crisis, love, nature, illness, and sudden, unpredictable change.

For years the legend of Buddy Bolden was overshadowed by myths about his music, his reckless lifestyle, and his mental instability. This book overlays the myths with the substance of reality. Interviews with those who knew Bolden and an extensive array of primary sources enliven and inform Donald M. Marquis's absorbing portrait.

A woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. The most personal of Claudia Emerson's poetry collections, Late Wife is both an elegy and a celebration of a rich present informed by a complex past.

On April 24, 1862, Federal gunboats made their way past two Confederate forts to ascend the Mississippi River, and the Union navy captured New Orleans. News of the loss of the City came to Jefferson Davis as an absolute shock. In this study, Chester Hearn examines the decisions, actions, individuals, and events to explain why.

An account of race relations, black response to white discrimination, and the black community behind the walls of segregation in a border town. The title echoes Blyden Jackson's recollection of his childhood in Louisville, where blacks were always aware that there were two very distinct Louisvilles, one of which they were excluded from.

Argues that writers like Cable, Twain, and Faulkner cannot be read exclusively within the context of a nationalistically defined "American" literature, but must also be understood in light of the cultural legacy that French and Spanish colonialism bestowed on the Deep South and the Mississippi River Valley.

The Civil War writings of G. Campbell Brown - cousin, stepson, and staff officer of famed Confederate General Richard S. Ewell - provide a comprehensive account of the major campaigns in the north Virginia theater. Terry Jones gathers these widely scattered but oft-cited primary sources into a deftly edited volume.

Following her critically acclaimed first book of poetry, Judy Jordan here returns to a time in her life when she was homeless and working as a pizza deliverer. She absorbs the life experiences and unmet dreams of her coworkers, the parking lot prostitutes, and the other homeless with whom she shares coffee refills.

In her enchanting poem sequence, Doris Davenport introduces readers to Soque Street and its "Affrilachian" residents. These African Americans inhabiting an Appalachian community in northeast Georgia live in a world where magic threads daily life and the living and dead commingle.

With a storyteller's timing and the emotional range of a singer, Darnell Arnoult in her debut collection offers readers a stirring string of poems about the people of Fieldale, Virginia. A planned community founded in the Virginia foothills by Marshall Fields in the early 1900s to support his textile mill, Fieldale was populated by transplanted Appalachian mountain folk. Arnoult herself grew up there, a third-generation resident and among the first generation to go to college. She took away with her the oral history of her home, and in What Travels With Us she captures in poetic form the townspeople's voices, both remembered and imagined. Personal, poignant, and witty, Arnoult's poems look back as they move forward, demonstrating how we are always creating ourselves anew from the experiences we carry with us.

Hubert McAlexander's accomplished portrait of Peter Taylor (1917-1994) achieves a remarkable intimacy with this central figure in the history of the American short story and one of the greatest southern writers of his time.

In this sweeping narrative of the South from the Civil War to the present, noted historian David Goldfield contemplates the roots of southern memory and explains how this memory has shaped the modern South both for good and ill.

This elegantly written biography depicts the combined effect of social structure, character, and national crisis on a woman's life - Mary Greenhow Lee (1819-1907). Lee's personal history is an intriguing story. It is also an account of the complex social relations that characterized nineteenth-century life.

Poet and cardiologist John Stone is a man of many voices. A gifted verse maker, he exhibits in his writing the qualities of a compassionate physician, a musician, linguist, naturalist, and grandfather, son, husband, and brother. Selections from four previous books together with twenty-two new works compose this exquisite volume.

With charm and vivid detail, the acclaimed novelist Elizabeth Spencer acquaints readers with the places and people, the pleasures and heartaches, she has known in her life. A deeply affecting memoir by an esteemed American author, Landscapes of the Heart reveals Spencer to be both a part of and forever apart from her beloved southern roots.

In her first collection, Suji Kwock Kim confronts a number of difficult subjects - colonialism, the Korean War, emigration, racism, and love. She considers what a homeland would be for a divided nation and a divided self: what it means to enter language, the body, the family, the community; to be a daughter, sister, lover, citizen, or exile.

Pierre Cleiament de Laussat was the last representative of a foreign power to exercise authority in Louisiana. Appointed colonial prefect, these memoirs, covering the period from January 1803 to July 1804, provide a unique firsthand perspective on the momentous transaction that doubled the size of the United States.

While many scholars have examined the slavery disputes in the halls of Congress, Subversives is the first history of practical abolitionism in the streets, homes, and places of business of America's capital.