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. In resonant verse pointed by Cajun language, these poems measure the good that can come from destructive situations: maternal deprivation, spiritual poverty, mania, ecological devastation. Serpas shows that compromised marshes and the Gulf of Mexico offe...

The Diener investigates loss and healing, change and permanence, in a hospital trauma center and the eroding landscape of southern Louisiana. The diener himself, the morgue attendant who assists the dead in the interstice between the living world and the world beyond, is the person with whom Martha Serpas most identifies in this collection. As a part-time hospital chaplain, Serpas possesses keen insight into the despair and resolve of patients and their families and friends.Yet the...

This anthology gathers the strong voices of accomplished poets reaching into and beyond nostalgia to remember, to honor, and to document through figurative imagery their experiences of Mexico and the vibrant border areas before the ravages of narco-violence.Locals Listen to the Mariachi Band at El Jardin in San MiguelYou see their silhouettes along the stone wallor arm in arm below the glow of garden lightshuddled like foothills, earth you coul...

"At once a love song and a dirge to a landscape being swallowed by the waters that define it."—St. Petersburg TimesAn evocative meditation on destruction and creation, the sacred and ephemeral, along Louisiana's coast. In poems that bear witness to the eroding bayou country and its Cajun culture, Martha Serpas venerates a vanishing landscape defined by water—sensuous, fecund, and destructive. As marsh turns into gulf, identity and consciousness are transfo...

Lucky Fish travels along a lush current — a confluence of leaping vocabulary and startling formal variety, with upwelling gratitude at its source: for love, motherhood, “new hope,” and the fluid and rich possibilities of words themselves. With an exuberant appetite for “my morning song, my scurry-step, my dew,” anchored in complicated human situations, this astounding young poet’s third collection of poems is her strongest yet. "Nezhukumatathil's third book is fascinated with the ...

"Inseminating the Elephant [is] a collection of poems, often laced with humor, that examines popular culture, the limits of the human body, and the tragicomic aspects of everyday experience."-Pulitzer Prize finalist citation"These poems are tough and witty."-The New Yorker"Whoever told you poetry isn't for everyone hasn't read Lucia Perillo."-Time Out New YorkA 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Inseminating the Elephant delivers hard-...

Booth's eighth poetry collection, with its evocations of compassion, tenderness and invading darkness, implies that redemption will come only from having loved well and wisely. Publishers Weekly remarked, "Booth is a traveler keenly, almost mystically, aware that 'how you get there is where you'll arrive.' "

This bold, wide-ranging collection -- his sixth book of poems -- demonstrates the unmistakable lyricism, fierce observation, and force of feeling that have made Mark Doty's poems special to readers on both sides of the Atlantic.The poems in Source deepen Doty's exploration of the paradox of selfhood. They offer a complex, boldly colored self-portrait; their muscular lines argue fiercely with the fact of limit; they pulse with the drama of perception and the quest to forge meaning.

Opening with a powerful cycle of elegies for her long-distant, half-brother, this major new collection by one of our bestselling poets then goes on to include both serious and funny poems about women and poems about the precarious balance of nature, ending with the beautiful, life-affirming "The Art of Blessing the Day." 160 pp.

Winner of the 2009 Donald Hall Prize in PoetryThese poems address issues of death and personal crisis by filtering them through an obsession with monsters and animals. After an initial loss, the speaker of these poems tries to utilize different personae—monsters, people stuck in horror movies—before turning his attention to the dreamlike animals that stalk him. Eventually, the speaker tries to resolve the conflicts among the figures by creating a cobbled-together g...

In Waterlines, Louisiana native Alison Pelegrin gives us poems that describe the terrible power of nature even as they underscore the state’s beauty. The poet moves from the familiar gaudy delights of life in New Orleans to immerse the reader in the vastly different experience of living north of Lake Pontchartrain. In this fractured world, the Bogue Falaya River becomes a highway paved with benedictions, psalms, and praise for ordinary things, as Pelegrin searches the unfamiliar f...

"from this sea I am fished, / gutted and stripped, / bled and bound, / on your ship I sail, / or go down."A Lovely Gutting echoes with the music of traditional nature poetry, but its romantic style is ripped by rawness. These poems - enraged and erotic, tormented and tender - swirl around the pain of personal loss, ebbing and surging like the North Atlantic.Durnford pictures a Newfoundland not found in postcards. Her verse roams an island only half-wild, a ramshack...