Louisiana Books

Beautifully various and distinguished--like a needle in the eye. I adore this book and this poet.

Year of Morphines
Poems
Betsy Brown
The National Poetry Series / Selected by George Garrett
"Allusive, edgy, smart, and utterly relentless, the poems of Year of Morphines move gracefully in the zone between our necessary morphine spells of forgetting and life's implausible reclamations: `. . . all these stories ending with life.'"-George Garrett, from his judge's citation
Betsy Brown is no stranger to loss. Breast cancer runs rampant in her family; both her mother and her thirty-two-year-old sister died of the disease and another sister has been diagnosed with its late stages. Her father also fell victim to cancer, this time pancreatic. The poems in Brown's stunning first book pivot around the mechanisms we use in facing loss and fear-whether those confrontations are as wrenching as a bone marrow transplant or as confused as a brief love.
In lyric verses with a driving narrative force, the poet depicts loved ones coping with illness, sometimes achieving recovery, and reshaping a family. From his hospital bed a father relates "the color of his pain-killers, / the in-and-out narcotic conversations / of the doomed." A woman recalls Baltimore, where her sister received treatment, as "a city of doctors, messy brain scans, / slick cobblestoned lanes thick / with Christmas." She returns to the spot where her sister's cremated remains were scattered, relishing "the secrets of ashes, / the clean wash of lake water / like all the nights we sat / with the little waves lapping."
An unusually intimate collection, Year of Morphines is both a heartbreaking portrait of the process of death and encouraging evidence of life's perseverance.
A native of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Betsy Brown works in corporate communications in Minneapolis.

I am from New Orleans, and this book was a great reference. You can discover the city, and even learn more about fun things and the historical places to see in New Orleans, and not just the night life! - Which is great, but we have days too and they are worth the time to explore this beautiful city of ours.

Any serious student of public speaking needs to read it. It's so insightful and easy to read.

Item contains useful information for anyone attempting a genealogical exploration, which might include an ancestor of color who lived in the New Orleans area at post Civil War time. (reviewer's disclosure: the author is my sister)

I highly recommend this two-volume set as a first step towarding delving into the history of this southern Louisiana area. Mary Alice Fontenot has done an excellent job of researching and documenting many events and personalities in Acadia Parish, and appears to have thoroughly documented her resources. Reading through this set of books has sparked my interest in learning more about Acadia Parish, as I believe was Ms. Fontenot's intent. Her closing remark in the foreword of Volume II states, "It is hoped that these topics will be more fully developed within the near future, and that one of Acadia's most valuable historical resources -- the recollection of its senior citizens -- will be more widely recognized and utilized." I sincerely hope Ms. Fontenot has continued to research Acadia Parish history and will publish additional volumes to this set in the near future.

Inspired by the culinary traditions of southern Louisiana's beautiful plantations along the Atchafalaya Basin country, the "Acadian Plantation Country Cookbook" is a compilation of superbly presented recipes selected and compiled by bed and breakfast operator Anne Butler whose B&B is located on her family homestead in the historic Butler Greenwood Plantation -- which has been in her family since the 1790s. Therefore Anne brings to bear a very special expertise with recipes ranging from Smothering Beef -- Cajun Style; Louisiana Grits Bread; Crawfish Gumbo; and Jim Bowie's Hush Puppies; to Fried Alligator; Chretien Point Plantation Praline French Toast; Cajun Classic Boudin; and Richard's Smoked Sausage Jambalaya. The recipes are organized according to the plantation they are associated with and interspersed in an informative text and historic photographs illustrating each particular plantation whose cuisine is being showcased. An elegant tribute to Louisiana's culinary traditions, Anne Bulter's "Acadian Plantation Country Cookbook" is a highly prized and recommended addition to family and community library cookbook collections.

This is a very nice guide to plants of a specific region of Louisiana. If you live in the state, it is great guide to have to identify all the local plants. Easy to read, great drawings, but it is out of print.

"No act of kindness goes unpunished" might be an alternative title for this explosive and meticulously researched book. It is a fast-paced indictment of the festering Bubba subculture in southeastern Louisiana, a subculture engulfed in ignorance, seething hatred and extreme violence.

In the midst of one such backwoods garden of evil lived a woman who was virtually a paragon of goodness, Jane Nora Guillory, affectionately known as Genore. She was a professional woman of color with comfortable means who worked for a local insurance office. A loving and generous woman, Genore took into her heart and her care some thirty forgotten dogs, kenneling them along with the horses that she owned. She distinguished herself by many selfless acts, such as providing money and work for white neighbors who were struggling financially.

It was all the more shocking that this lovely forty-two-year-old woman would be raped and murdered in an act of unthinkable cruelty. But who would do such a thing and why? The community was unprepared for the answer.

Hustmyre, a writer with 22 years in law enforcement and retired federal agent, deftly takes the reader through the intimate twists and turns of the investigation. The reader can easily feel the frustrations of a dedicated sheriff's department that had solved the unsolvable, only to find that the DA that wanted to dismiss charges against the white supremacists responsible for her death.

This book of poems about the people caught up in the Salem witch trials in the 1690s has an important and innovative technique: it weaves together poetry, historical research, the voices of people from the past, and the voice of the poet in the present doing the research. It would be great to see more poets following Cooley's lead here, and it's a way in which these poems could be significantly influential if they get a wide enough audience. It's a logical extension of New Historicism, the new belle lettre movement, and Cultural Studies. If we're going to acknowledge the subjective and language-based roots of history, then going all the way down that road leads to the kind of poetry Cooley is writing here. It's infinitely more positive, and responsible, then taking that same road into the dead end of apathy or agnosticism about history.

The good thing is that Cooley keeps her history solid. She did your homework, she cites her sources, and she isn't distorting the "facts" to suit her rhetorical ends. These are all things that poets have a bad reputation for when they take on history, even for a moment--see Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," when everyone just shrugs off the sloppy use of Cortez in the name of "poetic license." Cooley seems to be undertaking a whole new way of approaching "poetic license," redeeming it and moving it forward in a way that is perfectly in tune with her moment in literary history. Having the poems themselves be so moving and well crafted is icing on the cake.

I read the book through in one sitting, and it let me see the way she strikes a nice balance between recurring images, motifs, etc., and finding something new to say and do in each poem. I liked the way Cooley uses the language of the historical figures in a musical and impressionistic way--I know it must have been difficult to provide enough of their voices to convey character and period flavor without letting it crowd out her own voice. Cooley works the two voices together well to let them modulate with one another without being overly theatrical or artificial about it. The mark of a pro.

Cooley makes the wise decision NOT to make her central focus a study of motive: why the first four girls started the lying and why others joined in. This has already been done so many times by other writers taking on the Salem witch trials, most famously of course in Arthur Miller's "The Crucible." It was a much better call to investigate what the actions of all parties came to mean within a context of femininity, religion, self-sacrifice, truth & fiction, mystery and history, etc. These aspects of historical investigation make the vehicle of poetry an asset, even a necessity, and not just a clever add-on. It also, importantly, makes it seem like the poetry is there to serve the cause of these misunderstood women, rather than the poet coming across as a creative writer trespassing on the intimate past of these people for her own personal profit or convenience (as in so much bad historical fiction). This is especially strong in "The Waste Book" (the conclusion of which is my favorite pair of lines in the volume).

I had several favorites in this collection--probably "The Salem Witch Trials Memorial" has all of the things I like best all together. The structure works brilliantly to capture the way the mind and the eye work together in a setting like that, and emotionally the interruptions of the names and phrases continually shadows and emphasizes the poet's own (and the reader's) thoughts. The final line is genuinely chilling and appeals to both heart and head in a way that encapsulates the project of the entire collection for me. "Testimony: the Parris House" is another one that sticks to the ribs. So does "Publick Fast"--image, structure, and character all come together well here, and this one is I think best illustrates Cooley's fine musical ear.

I was moved and stimulated by what is written here. Cooley sees both wide and deep, and her writing is simultaneously (not alternately) clear and suggestive.

Amelia makes the area come alive again through this book. She provides the balance needed in local history for African-Americans -- and respects the traditions which may soon be forgotten memories of past lives.

Her work focuses on two important parts of local history - the traditions in families living in Mars Bluff -- and the search for why tales of rice growing lives on in an area more than 150 miles from the "Low Country" and rice plantations of the old South Carolina. Both concepts are treated with respect while holding a scholarly approach to local history.

Amelia's work is something that may not be the same "fare" as Edward Ball's "Slaves in the Family" -- but its contribution to A-A genealogy, local history and preservation of oral traditions is extremely important. It is the foreword to any history of the Pee Dee area of South Carolina -- and should be treasured as a rare insight on the real lives of real people -- and the years that follow Reconstruction.