Download or read book In the Creole Twilight written by Joshua Clegg Caffery and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2015-09-07 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of the recurring motifs found in south Louisiana's culture spring from the state's rich folklore. Influenced by settlers of European and African heritage, celebrated customs like the Courir de Mardi Gras and fabled creatures like the Loup-Garou grow out of the region's distinctive oral tradition. Joshua Clegg Caffery's In the Creole Twilight draws from this vibrant and diverse legacy to create an accessible reimagining of the state's traditional storytelling and songs. A scholar and Grammy-nominated musician, Caffery borrows from the syllabic structures, rhyme schemes, narratives, and settings that characterize Louisiana songs and tales to create new verse that is both well-researched and refreshingly inventive. Paired with original pen-and-ink illustrations as well as notes that clarify the origins of characters and themes, Caffery's compositions provide a link to the old worlds of southern Louisiana while constructing an entirely new one.
Download or read book Unquiet Things written by James Davis May and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2016-03-07 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grounded in wonder and fueled by an impulse to praise, the poems in James Davis May's debut collection, Unquiet Things, grapple with skepticism, violence, and death to generate lasting insights into the human experience. With compassion and humor, this second and final volume in Claudia Emerson's Goat Island Poets series exposes the unseen tragedies and rejoices in the small, surprising moments of grace in everyday life. May's poems impart sincere astonishment at the natural world, where experiences of nature serve as "stand-ins, almost, / for grace." His poems seek to transcend cynicism, turning often to the landscapes of North Georgia, his native Pittsburgh, and eastern Europe, as well as to his literary forebears, for guidance. For the poet, no force propels that transcendence more powerfully than love: love for his wife and daughter, love for language, and love for the incomprehensible world that he inhabits. These stylistically varied poems are by turns conversational, earnest, self-deprecating, meditative, and often funny, whether they're discussing grand themes such as love and beauty, or more corporeal subjects like fever and food poisoning. Lyrical and strange, tragic and amusing, Unquiet Things traces an experiential journey in the ordinary world, uncovering joys that span from the lingering memories of childhood to the losses and triumphs of adulthood.
Download or read book Book of No Ledge written by Nance Van Winckel and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2016-10-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “As usual, it starts with love. I had my heart set on the door-to-door encyclopedia salesboy.” So begins Nance Van Winckel’s latest collection of poetically altered encyclopedia entries that feature a mixture of quirky social satire and absurdist wit. Entries like “The Importance of Mood to Man” use an encyclopedic tone to insist: “Your body is two-thirds water. Mood is one-third body” and “Life and health depend on the mood taken into the body each day.” An anatomic diagram of the nose is accompanied by the promise, “A nose can smell rain coming.” Alongside illustrations of the vestibule, the meatus, and the conchus can be found lines of text like, “As the one you love steps onto / your stoop / a widening wind / underscores the sky’s pummel.” Reminiscent of recent visual-poetic hybrids by such writers as Matthea Harvey and Bianca Stone, Van Winckel’s ground-breaking innovations must be seen to be believed.
Download or read book Cajun Literature and Cajun Collective Memory written by Mathilde Köstler and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-12-19 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does Cajun literature, emerging in the 1980s, represent the dynamic processes of remembering in Cajun culture? Known for its hybrid constitution and deeply ingrained oral traditions, Cajun culture provides an ideal testing ground for investigating the collective memory of a group. In particular, francophone and anglophone Cajun texts by such writers as Jean Arceneaux, Tim Gautreaux, Jeanne Castille, Zachary Richard, Ron Thibodeaux, Darrell Bourque, and Kirby Jambon reveal not only a shift from an oral to a written tradition. They also show hybrid perspectives on the Cajun collective memory. Based on recurring references to place, the texts also reflect on the (Acadian) past and reveal the innate ability of the Cajuns to adapt through repeated intertextual references. The Cajun collective memory is thus defined by a transnational outlook, a transversality cutting across various ethnic heritages to establish and legitimize a collective identity both amid the linguistic and cultural diversity in Louisiana, and in the face of American mainstream culture. Cajun Literature and Cajun Collective Memory represents the first analysis of the mnemonic strategies Cajun writers use to explore and sustain the Cajun identity and collective memory.
Download or read book Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana written by Joshua Clegg Caffery and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alan Lomax's prolific sixty-four-year career as a folklorist and musicologist began with a trip across the South and into the heart of Louisiana's Cajun country during the height of the Great Depression. In 1934, his father John, then curator of the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song, took an eighteen-year-old Alan and a 300-pound aluminum disk recorder into the rice fields of Jennings, along the waterways of New Iberia, and behind the gates of Angola State Penitentiary to collect vestiges of African American and Acadian musical tradition. These recordings now serve as the foundational document of indigenous Louisiana music. Although widely recognized by scholars as a key artifact in the understanding of American vernacular music, most of the recordings by John and Alan Lomax during their expedition across the central-southern fringe of Louisiana were never transcribed or translated, much less studied in depth. This volume presents, for the first time, a comprehensive examination of the 1934 corpus and unveils a multifaceted story of traditional song in one of the country's most culturally dynamic regions. Through his textual and comparative study of the songs contained in the Lomax collection, Joshua Clegg Caffery provides a musical history of Louisiana that extends beyond Cajun music and zydeco to the rural blues, Irish and English folk songs, play-party songs, slave spirituals, and traditional French folk songs that thrived at the time of these recordings. Intimate in its presentation of Louisiana folklife and broad in its historical scope, Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana honors the legacy of John and Alan Lomax by retrieving these musical relics from obscurity and ensuring their understanding and appreciation for generations to come. Includes: Complete transcriptions of the 1934 Lomax field recordings in southwestern Louisiana Side-by-side translations from French to English Photographs from the 1934 field trip and biographical details about the performers
Download or read book Staging Frontiers written by William G. Acree (Jr.) and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2020 Best Book in the Nineteenth Century Award from the LASA Nineteenth Century Section Swashbuckling tales of valiant gauchos roaming Argentina and Uruguay were nineteenth-century Latin American best sellers. But when these stories jumped from the page to the circus stage and beyond, their cultural, economic, and political influence revolutionized popular culture and daily life. In this expansive and engaging narrative William Acree guides readers through the deep history of popular entertainment before turning to circus culture and rural dramas that celebrated the countryside on stage. More than just riveting social experiences, these dramas were among the region's most dominant attractions on the eve of the twentieth century. Staging Frontiers further explores the profound impacts this phenomenon had on the ways people interacted and on the broader culture that influenced the region. This new, modern popular culture revolved around entertainment and related products, yet it was also central to making sense of social class, ethnic identity, and race as demographic and economic transformations were reshaping everyday experiences in this rapidly urbanizing region.
Download or read book Curses and Wishes written by Carl Adamshick and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2011-04-22 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The unusual voice encountered in Curses and Wishes carries a quiet, slightly elevatedconversational tone, which flows from intimate secrets to wider social concerns. The poet has faith in economy and trusts in images to transfer knowledge that speech cannot. In Curses and Wishes the short, simple lines add up to a thoughtful book possessed with lyrical melancholy, a harmony of sadness and joy that sings: "May happiness be a wheel, a lit throne, spinning / in the vast pinprick of darkness." By the close of this ambitious work the poet has inspired readers to see the multifaceted effects of our human connections.
Download or read book The Voodoo Encyclopedia written by Jeffrey E. Anderson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-08-26 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compelling reference work introduces the religions of Voodoo, a onetime faith of the Mississippi River Valley, and Vodou, a Haitian faith with millions of adherents today. Unlike its fictional depiction in zombie films and popular culture, Voodoo is a full-fledged religion with a pantheon of deities, a priesthood, and communities of believers. Drawing from the expertise of contemporary practitioners, this encyclopedia presents the history, culture, and religion of Haitian Vodou and Mississippi Valley Voodoo. Though based primarily in these two regions, the reference looks at Voodoo across several cultures and delves into related religions, including African Vodu, African Diasporic Religions, and magical practices like hoodoo. Through roughly 150 alphabetical entries, the work describes various aspects of Voodoo in Louisiana and Haiti, covering topics such as important places, traditions, rituals, and items used in ceremonies. Contributions from scholars in the field provide a comprehensive overview of the subject from various perspectives and address the deities and ceremonial acts. The book features an extensive collection of primary sources and a selected, general bibliography of print and electronic resources.
Download or read book Pacific Shooter written by Susan Parr and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2009-03-01 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Pacific Shooter is a book of transformations as insubordinate and subversive as Ovid's Metamorphoses -- and with all the taste and twang of a new language. The bourgeois reader will hate it: there's too much magic, too much genius, too much linguistic bliss." -- Susan Mitchell, from her judge's citation "Susan Parr's poetry is an orchestra of rim-shots and flashbang intimacy. 'Wind a sheet around all,' she croons in this vivid collection, 'then bring into the dark this beatific twill.' Her poems pop and vibrate on armatures of spiked sonics and an intellect that twirls with dazzling humor. Awash in verbal intimacies, Parr never forgets to mean, and in doing so she's turned up the potency -- a needle of her verse has a laser's power. Pacific Shooter is the playful sweetness in our last breath, and in these pages, Parr will 'afford you / the machine: the logomotive yo-yo. Go man,' her poems clap. 'Go: yo, yo.'" -- Alex Lemon
Download or read book Bridled written by Amy Meng and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2018-02-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this debut collection, Amy Meng meticulously strips a collapsing relationship for its parts. By dissecting the performativity and vulnerability of a person in love, with a singular precision, Meng’s poems are marked by an unflinching drive to confront the most troubling parts of love. Yet rather than being propelled by the broken heart, Bridled is triumphantly lit from the inside by the unexpected, miraculous growth of self.
Download or read book Arkansas Review written by and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book In Twilight s Hush written by Laurie Stevens and published by Laurie Stevens. This book was released on 2020-04-04 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Detective Gabriel McRay investigates a cold case from 1988 involving a missing teenager named Nancy Lewicki. Evidence is sparse and Gabriel has no leads. Much to his dismay, a celebrity psychic, Carmen Jenette, hypes the unsolved case on her television show. Gabriel warns Carmen not to interfere. Meanwhile, strange dreams of water and corpses haunt Gabriel's sleep. They unnerve him as he plans his wedding to LA County Medical Examiner, Dr. Ming Li. When the psychic's life is threatened, Gabriel connects the dots back to the missing girl and realizes his cold case is burning hot. Someone doesn't want Nancy found and will kill to keep her hidden.
Download or read book Trading Bright Lights for Lightning Bugs written by Jann Franklin and published by Page Publishing Inc. This book was released on 2022-11-03 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Jen Guidry begins the process of choosing a school for her kindergartener, she celebrates all the opportunities that big-city life offers. Unfortunately for Jen, her husband has other ideas. He's ready to ditch the big-city headaches and move back to his hometown with a population of only 298 people. Jen finds herself along with her family (husband Mike, five-year-old Henry, and three-year-old James) trading in the bright lights of Dallas, Texas, for the lightning bugs of Graisseville, Louisiana. All Jen can think about is how far she'll have to drive to find a good cup of coffee. The boys are ecstatic to be surrounded by trees and open spaces where they can just run. Mike is settling into his new role as owner of Big Ed's Parts 'n' More. Jen, however, has to make new friends and deal with all the eccentricities small-town life adds to her plate. As Jen navigates the nuances and backstories everyone else in town takes for granted, she finds new friends and new adventures. She volunteers to coordinate the Live Nativity event at her church, finds a backup beauty queen, and organizes the annual Mardi Gras Parade. Jen finds she is living a life she never realized she was missing. Will she be able to completely give up the bright lights forever and appreciate her yard full of lightning bugs?
Download or read book The Keeper s Voice written by Mike Carson and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-05-01 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 beauty, of goodness. Direct and often colloquial in their language and traditional in their forms—blank verse, quatrains, sonnets—the poems’ voices arise from a wide range of viewpoints and situations: from an altar boy thawing a frozen gate lock while early Mass goes on without him, to a returning Vietnam veteran who takes up bull riding; from a boy calling cows in the pre-dawn dark, to a narrator providing instructions for teaching crows to talk; from a new cop, a Christian who must shoot to kill in a ghetto bar, to a family discovering the ashes of a stillborn child among a dead sister’s belongings. One poem interweaves locker room slogans with phrases from the Requiem Mass for a friend who died playing football; another centers around a single shout from a wife to her husband threatened by an untethered bull. Refreshingly straightforward, yet suffused with weight, maturity, and passion, The Keeper’s Voice projects a wise and uncompromising vision.
Download or read book Swimming Against the Storm written by Jess Butterworth and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An adventure story set in the swamplands of Louisiana about sisters, rising sea-levels and saving the environment, perfect for fans of Katherine Rundell and Lauren St John. Our land is sinking. It's disappearing into the water. And no one knows how to save it. Twelve-year-old Eliza and her sister Avery have lived their entire lives in a small fishing village on the coast of Louisiana, growing up alongside turtles, pelicans and porpoises. But now, with sea levels rising, their home is at risk of being swept away. Determined to save the land, Eliza and her younger sister Avery secretly go searching in the swamp for the dangerous, wolf-like loup-garou. If they can prove this legendary creature exists, they're sure that the government will have to protect its habitat - and their community. But there's one problem: the loup-garou has never been seen before. And with a tropical storm approaching and the sisters deep, deep in the swampland, soon it's not just their home at risk, but their lives as well...
Download or read book Exile and Post 1946 Haitian Literature written by Martin Munro and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature provides readers with an excellent introduction to recent Haitian literature, one of the richest literary traditions in the Americas. Martin Munro focuses on works written after 1946, a period in which exile has become the dominant theme in Haitian literature. Using this notion of Haitian writing as a literature of exile, Munro analyzes key novels by the most important figures of each generation of the past sixty years, including Jacques Stephen Alexis, René Depestre, Émile Ollivier, Dany Laferrière, and Edwidge Danticat.
Download or read book Texas School Book Depository written by Cathryn Hankla and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2000-05-01 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humorous, quirky, and spiritually meditative by turns, Cathryn Hankla's prose poems move by associative leaps and take their inspirations from cultural and personal icons. A shadow narrative moors the collection in the perspective of a woman who survives a difficult childhood to eventually comprehend the paradoxes of adult life and whose journeys into her heritage bring her to a fuller realization of her place in the world. Travels to Prague and Paris, allusions to literary, spiritual, artistic, and political figures, local and familial lore -- all become ready touchstones for the revelation of feeling and reevaluations of identity and the nature of freedom. While recognizing the danger in exploration, Hankla takes pleasure in questioning the status quo and takes issue with those who sidestep emotional or intellectual adversities by affecting apathy. In the title poem, the huge cache of the Louvre is searched, not for the famed Mona Lisa or Egyptian antiquities, but in a metaphorical quest for something now forever lost -- a nation's collective naoveti, destroyed with Kennedy's assassination, from the gunman's nest in what was then the Texas School Book Depository. Intimate and unusual, amusing and moving, Texas School Book Depository is a truly wondrous offering.
