Poetry. These poems are poised and self-contained, humming with an internal logic and an external music that soothes and disturbs by turns. They are dense and lush, yet offer the reader uncluttered clarity.
Celebrated poet Julie Kane returns to her Boston Irish Catholic roots in this collection about mothers and daughters shaped by the forces of Irish history and Irish--American culture. Mothers of Ireland confronts how the legacy of personal trauma gets passed down to subsequent generations, with a focus on women from her family history and their paths of both pain and endurance.
Dorie LaRue's title alludes to a line from Othello "O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains." In this searingly honest collection, the enemy is drugs, and the brains being stolen are those of our children.
From her first book, Aerial View of Louisiana, published in 1979, Cleopatra Mathis has given us poems that somehow manage to be elegant and visceral at once.
Patrice Melnick's latest collection is a Dear John letter to her "old lover," New Orleans. Amidst brown scum waterlines and refrigerators taped shut like rancid clams, her post-Katrina speaker recalls the good times of the broken relationship. Many writers have conveyed the sights or tastes of the city, but Melnick excels at capturing its smells, sounds, and sweaty skin-feels.
Martha Serpas's Double Effect reimagines a principle first outlined by St. Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica, which considers whether an action is morally permissible if it causes harm while bringing about a good result.