Bøger udgivet af Louisiana State University Press

A Scar Where Goodbyes Are Written is a bilingual anthology of poetry written by fifteen Venezuelan poets who are currently residing in Chile. Edited and translated by David M. Brunson, the volume encompasses the work of young poets coming from many different circumstances. Some have already published several books, while others have just begun their careers as writers. The vast majority of the original Spanish texts appeared in books, anthologies, and magazines across Chile, Venezuela, and elsewhere in the Hispanosphere. In recent years, more than six million people have fled Venezuela in one of the world's largest mass migrations, stemming in part from an ongoing humanitarian crisis caused by the country's backsliding into authoritarianism, brutal political repression, corruption, food and medical shortages, violent crime, hyperinflation, and the mismanagement of Venezuela's natural and financial resources, first by Hugo Chávez and presently by Nicolás Maduro. Begun during Brunson's travels in Chile amid the 2019-2020 protest movement, this dual-language collection aims to elevate the individual voices of each migrant poet, to connect them with new readers, and to enrich the body of literature available in English.

A book-length sequence of poems, Matthew Thorburn's String tells the story of a teenage boy's experiences in a time of war and its aftermath. He loses his family and friends, his home and the life he knew, but survives to tell his story. Written in the boy's fractured, echoing voice--in lines that are frequently enjambed and use almost no punctuation--String embodies his trauma and confusion in a poetic sequence that is part lullaby, part nightmare, but always a music that is uniquely his.

Jenny Molberg's third collection of poetry, The Court of No Record, serves as both evidence and testimony against a legal system that often fails victims of physical trauma and domestic abuse. Drawing inspiration from true crime investigations and artifacts, including Frances Glessner Lee's crime scene dioramas and the tragic aftermaths of two serial killers who preyed upon women in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Molberg probes a cultural obsession with violence that performs active erasure of victims' lives. By engaging with historical texts through a personal lens, she sheds light on survivors who do not find justice and looks toward a future of positive systemic reformation.

David G. Haglund's Sister Republics tells the story of the unique relationship between the United States and its first ally, France. Historians and political scientists have characterized interactions between the two countries in the spheres of security and defense policy in radically different ways: either the two comport themselves in a highly cooperative fashion, befitting their status as old allies and steadfast friends, or they act as bitter rivals, revealing their alliance to be at best dysfunctional and at worst destructive. Haglund uses a fresh approach to reconcile these divergent positions, examining the Franco-American bond through the prism of strategic culture. In doing so, he reveals the cultural factors that have contributed to the suboptimal relationship between the two nations.

Popular entertainment in antebellum Cincinnati ran the gamut from high culture to shows barely above the level of the tawdry. Among the options for those seeking entertainment in the summer of 1856 was the display of a "Wild Woman," purportedly a young woman captured while living a feral life beyond the frontier. The popular exhibit, which featured a silent, underdressed woman chained to a bed, was almost assuredly a hoax. Local activist women, however, used their influence to prompt a judge to investigate the display. The court employed eleven doctors, who forcibly subdued and examined the woman before advising that she be admitted to an insane asylum. In his riveting analysis of this remarkable episode in antebellum American history, Michael D. Pierson describes how people in different political parties and sections of the country reacted to the exhibit. Specifically, he uses the lens of the Wild Woman display to explore the growing cultural divisions between the North and the South in 1856, especially the differing gender ideologies of the northern Republican Party and the more southern focused Democrats. In addition, Pierson shows how the treatment of the Wild Woman of Cincinnati prompted an increasing demand for women's political and social empowerment at a time when the country allowed for the display of a captive female without evidence that she had granted consent.

Moving effortlessly from Virginia to Italy and beyond, Ron Smith's new volume responds with a range of emotions from humor to horror and with a variety of forms from the sonnet to visually expressive organic shapes. The book's forty-three pieces gather themselves into three flights that hover above and touch down among the politics of memory and the psychology of beauty. With inspiration drawn from memoir, myth, history, fiction, and the visual arts, That Beauty in the Trees presents, ponders, and sometimes judges the actions, fates, and aesthetics of not only the author's friends and family but also legendary and historical figures, including Achilles, Catullus, George Washington, Edgar Allan Poe, H.D., Ezra Pound, and many more.

The reach of Divine Ratios is global, ranging from Tang Dynasty China and the Florentine Renaissance to contemporary Baltimore, post-World War II Berlin, and the landscapes of the Mountain West. The speed and mobility evoked in this new collection by Jacqueline Osherow are not only physical--a traveler's movement in a crowded, thrilling world--but imaginative, and its poetic idiom is no less varied, as a breezy conversational tone serves as a counterpoint to traditional form. With striking juxtapositions of natural and cultural wonders, this enrapturing volume asks, what is the right proportion--or "ratio"--for living in a world of such splendors, horrors, and possibilities?

Titled after one of the side effects of antidepressants, Unusually Grand Ideas is a poignant account of clinical depression and the complications it introduces to marriage and fatherhood. James Davis May's poems describe mental illness with nuance, giving a full account of the darkness but also the flashes of hope, love, and even humor that lead toward healing. In pieces ranging from spare lyrical depictions of pain to discursive meditations that argue for hope, May searches for meaning by asking the difficult but important questions that both trouble and sustain us.

"Residents of the American South played a crucial and, at times, decisive role in the American war in Vietnam. President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk oversaw the military escalation of the conflict and the persistent U.S. rejection of a compromise settlement with North Vietnam and the Vietcong. Influential U.S. Senators Richard B. Russell and John C. Stennis endorsed and promoted aggressive prosecution of the war, ensured the conflict's funding, and helped enable Johnson and Nixon to extend the duration of the increasingly unpopular war. U.S. Army General William Westmoreland instituted vital strategies such as 'search and destroy' while directing the war through most of Johnson's presidency. Moreover, while young southern men served and died in Vietnam in numbers well beyond the region's percentage of the national population, most white southerners consistently endorsed the belligerent inclinations and actions of the U.S. In doing so, they provided an essential domestic political foundation for the Vietnam War. Joseph Fry's 'Letters from the Southern Homefront' explores public opinion in the American South--the nation's most prowar region during the Vietnam War--by examining letters sent by hundreds of residents to their senators, Presidents Johnson and Nixon, and the editors of major newspapers. They ranged in age from elementary school students to World War I veterans. They were white and Black; male and female; rural, small-town, and urban; sharecroppers, farmers, small business owners, teachers, doctors, lawyers, college students, and university professors; rich and poor. They discussed an impressive range of war-related issues and topics, including U.S. geopolitical and strategic interests; U.S. standing in the world; the containment of international communism; appropriate U.S. military strategies; civilian versus military oversight and control; national honor; patriotism; religion; the draft and its class and racial impacts; domestic protests against the war and questions of law and order; the Civil Rights Movement; POWs; the job performance of national and regional leaders; and the cumulative war-weariness so crucial to U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. By investing the time, thought, emotion, and energy to write to a political figure or newspaper editor, they exhibited a greater awareness and knowledge of foreign affairs than most southerners. This attention, knowledge, and willingness to write rendered the authors a distinct minority within their communities and nation. Although many of their neighbors and fellow citizens nationally followed the war carefully and held strong opinions regarding the conflict, relatively few of them took the initiative to put pen to paper or sit before their typewriters. As Fry shows, what the letter writers had to say about their support or opposition to the war add to our understanding of the South and the United States as we continue to grapple with the historical record and significance of the Vietnam War"--

"The Mardi Gras Indians are some of the most anticipated figures during Carnival season in New Orleans. Their parades on Mardi Gras day, Super Sunday, and St. Joseph's night are heavily attended as people crowd the streets of uptown and downtown, Central City, and local parks where the Indians are known to pass by, battle through dance, and compete like strutting peacocks for the title of 'prettiest.' Mardi Gras Indians explores how Mardi Gras or carnival season throughout the African diaspora came together in a gumbo-sized melting pot to birth one of the most unique traditions celebrating African culture, Indigenous peoples, and Black Americans. Williams ties together the fragments of the ancient traditions with the expressed experiences of the contemporary. From the sangamentos of the Kongolese and the calumets of the various tribes of the Lower Mississippi River Valley to one-on-one interviews with today's Black masking tribe members, this book highlights the spirit of resistance and rebellion that this culture was built upon. Much ink has been spilled about the history of the Mardi Gras Indians and the arduous tasks of making their suits. This book traces the Indian tradition from its nebulous and nascent beginnings to its secretive and codified practices of today, highlighting the voices of those who mask as they speak loudly and clearly about what they want people to know about the often-misunderstood culture they love. Big Chiefs Romeo Bougere, Bo Dollis Jr., and Keelian Boyd, along with Queens Cherice Harrison Nelson, Shawmika Edwards Boyd and a myriad of other Indians - living and ancestors alike - peel the mystique back on everything from their initiation into the culture, to how masking has or has not affected their family, finances, and even how they interact with people at their jobs. Tracking from the eighteenth century to present day, this in-depth look at the lives of the famed Mardi Gras Indians explores the culture that began in slavery, sprouted through segregation, and continued on as familial and neighborhood tradition to create iconic imagery, and extreme sentimentality among New Orleanians, Black Americans, and Mardi Gras lovers the world over"--

"Residents of the American South played a crucial and, at times, decisive role in the American war in Vietnam. President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk oversaw the military escalation of the conflict and the persistent U.S. rejection of a compromise settlement with North Vietnam and the Vietcong. Influential U.S. Senators Richard B. Russell and John C. Stennis endorsed and promoted aggressive prosecution of the war, ensured the conflict's funding, and helped enable Johnson and Nixon to extend the duration of the increasingly unpopular war. U.S. Army General William Westmoreland instituted vital strategies such as 'search and destroy' while directing the war through most of Johnson's presidency. Moreover, while young southern men served and died in Vietnam in numbers well beyond the region's percentage of the national population, most white southerners consistently endorsed the belligerent inclinations and actions of the U.S. In doing so, they provided an essential domestic political foundation for the Vietnam War. Joseph Fry's 'Letters from the Southern Homefront' explores public opinion in the American South--the nation's most prowar region during the Vietnam War--by examining letters sent by hundreds of residents to their senators, Presidents Johnson and Nixon, and the editors of major newspapers. They ranged in age from elementary school students to World War I veterans. They were white and Black; male and female; rural, small-town, and urban; sharecroppers, farmers, small business owners, teachers, doctors, lawyers, college students, and university professors; rich and poor. They discussed an impressive range of war-related issues and topics, including U.S. geopolitical and strategic interests; U.S. standing in the world; the containment of international communism; appropriate U.S. military strategies; civilian versus military oversight and control; national honor; patriotism; religion; the draft and its class and racial impacts; domestic protests against the war and questions of law and order; the Civil Rights Movement; POWs; the job performance of national and regional leaders; and the cumulative war-weariness so crucial to U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. By investing the time, thought, emotion, and energy to write to a political figure or newspaper editor, they exhibited a greater awareness and knowledge of foreign affairs than most southerners. This attention, knowledge, and willingness to write rendered the authors a distinct minority within their communities and nation. Although many of their neighbors and fellow citizens nationally followed the war carefully and held strong opinions regarding the conflict, relatively few of them took the initiative to put pen to paper or sit before their typewriters. As Fry shows, what the letter writers had to say about their support or opposition to the war add to our understanding of the South and the United States as we continue to grapple with the historical record and significance of the Vietnam War"--

"Structured in four sections, Now You Can Join the Others investigates desire's rage and absurdities, and the concentric circles of historical, mythical, and always personal narratives that ripple through our morally beclouded era. Questions of scale ground this second collection by Taije Silverman as poems about betrayal, pregnancy, and familial grief alternate with and expand into poems about catastrophe: Argentina's junta shares space with a child's nap. A birthday party at Chuck. E. Cheese becomes an elegy for Trayvon Martin. A Greek myth won't help contextualize the 2012 rape and dismemberment of a medical student in New Delhi. With acute dissonance, the poems follow shifts of attention and association to reveal how any symbol-whether moon, pigeon, whale, or bed-continuously redefines itself in the intricacies and turns of an individual voice. The poems' settings range as widely as their tones and formal structures: Berlin's Jewish Museum, an Italian roadside motel, Charlottesville's no-longer-extant Lee Park, and Mendocino's headlands provide backdrop for memory, observation, and unexpected confrontation. For all its thematic and rhetorical variety, what unifies the book is a sense of loss of origin, but also a recognition of the origin's inevitably imaginary nature"--