Lsu Press: 854 books

Bobby C. Rogers's second collection, Social History, listens hard to the voices of American characters and celebrates the gestures of ordinary life. The long lines of his narrative poems trace the undulations of southern speech, and his careful eye for detail reflects the influence of generations...

Set in the pastoral horse country of Rapidan, Virginia, the stories in Cary Holladay's Horse People chronicle the lives of the Fenton family through the Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II. At the center of these interconnected stories is Nelle, a northern debutante who marries into...

Infused with Mediterranean landscapes, the poems of Litanies Near Water, Paula Closson Buck's second collection, probe the world through language that acts sometimes like a divining rod and sometimes like a lightning rod. Elegant meditative lyrics such as "You Cannot Love the Wind" and "Theory of...

“Poignant, exquisite, and endlessly witty” — Kirkus Review (Starred Review) “People—the species defies logic!” reflects the protagonist of one of the dazzling, intricate stories in Visitations. In this latest collection from Lee Upton, characters navigate often bewildering situations,...

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...

Dave Smith's sixteenth poetry collection chronicles the arc of almost sixty years living in the American South. From dusty sawmills to the ubiquitous Waffle House, Hawks on Wires stages both mortal and comic dramas that speak to the poet's autumnal acceptance of himself and the South. Poems of growing...

In this collection, Jacqueline Osherow gives us perfectly formed, musical poems that glide between the worlds of art, architecture, literature, and religion. Traveling through Europe, Tel Aviv, and New York, Osherow observes with a keen eye the details of objects-beautiful buildings and ancient artifacts-and...

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, humor, science,...

One of the most critically acclaimed yet least recognized contemporary writers, African American author John Edgar Wideman creates work often described as difficult, even unfathomable. In Writing Blackness, James Coleman examines Wideman’s prolific body of work with the goal of making his often...

The racialized and exoticized cult of Voodoo occupies a central place in the popular image of the Crescent City. But as Kodi A. Roberts argues in Voodoo and Power, the religion was not a monolithic tradition handed down from African ancestors to their American-born descendants. Instead, a much more...

James Lee Burke developed the character of Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux through twenty mystery novels published over three decades. Despite readers’ increasing interest in Detective Robicheaux, his habits and preferences originate from a culture still unfamiliar to many of the books’ fans....

Throughout Louisiana's colonial and postcolonial periods, there evolved a highly specialized vocabulary for describing the region's buildings, people, and cultural landscapes. This creolized language -- a unique combination of localisms and words borrowed from French, Spanish, English, Indian, and...

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, natural and social scientists began comparing certain insects to human social organization. Entomologists theorized that social insects -- such as ants, bees, wasps, and termites -- organize themselves into highly specialized, hierarchical divisions...

Food sets the tempo of life in the Bayou State, where people believed in eating locally and seasonally long before it was fashionable. In Hungry for Louisiana: An Omnivore's Journey award-winning journalist Maggie Heyn Richardson takes readers to local farms, meat markets, restaurants, festivals,...