Sabine Series in Literature – serie

Collier Brown’s Scrap Bones reads like a post-pandemic epilogue to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” No angels or flying horses here, just panic disorders, email fatigue, and the spiritual dead end of a 23-and-Me test kit. And yet, resilient are the muses in this collection—the bees, the starlings, the dragonflies—skimming over the wastes.The Sabine Series in Literature...from “Orion, Break”they’re sleeping in their homes,they’re waking from their beds,they’re at their desksand on a call. They’re unimpressed.That’s not your fault.Nor your concern. I’m tiredof images, of lines and dots and codes.When I step into the dark,I only want the novasand the nowheres in between,and if I’m very lucky—if I’ve beaten all the odds—just one, naÏve fluoresceof the insect whois its own hello/goodbye.

A traditional game of chance popular in Mexico and in Mexican American culture, LoterÍa is poetically rendered in Esteban RodrÍguez’s eighth collection, with each poem revolving around one of the fifty-four cards. Using the image presented as a catalyst for exploration and self-reflection, RodrÍguez unveils the familial journey between two countries and cultures through both a surreal and narrative lens. Here, a mother unearths a severed hand in the desert. A father discovers his heart among a heap of discarded items. And at one point, the speaker—toggling between his role as witness and son—finds himself in a canoe on a river contemplating the meaning behind an authentic experience. Lyrical, insightful, and honestly engaging, LoterÍa sheds light on a world that doesn’t so easily reveal itself, adding to RodrÍguez’s prolific and important oeuvre.

Poet Suzanne Cleary, author of Crude Angel, says this about Elizabeth Burk’s new poetry collection, “Unmoored is both existentially serious and massively entertaining.” It is arranged loosely in the form of a memoir—as a New Yorker who married a Cajun, Burk lives part-time in southwest Louisiana and has published two chapbooks describing this experience, Learning to Love Louisiana and Louisiana Purchase. This new collection includes many poems from these chapbooks as well as new poems that focus on aging—on getting through the last stretch of life with grace and humor. Burk has compiled her work into a poetic memoir of a life well-lived and well-examined for all of its eccentricities and triumphs. Undoubtedly, Unmoored can be counted among the latter.

Wyatt W. Sallow, MBA—poet, business ethics professor, and coach of the 8th ranked collegiate chess team in East Texas—travels to the heart of northern England to trace his family origins in mundane Sallowsfield, only to find his supposed ancestry a mirage. He does have a real past, however: one that stalks him across the green hillsides in echoes of his catastrophic marriage, the lingering shadow of a lost child, and—there, in person, inexplicably emerging from the town’s faux-Victorian train station—“X,” the enigmatic object of his unrequited passion and a figure as perplexing as an algebraic variable. On his eight-day tour/pilgrimage/mock epic journey, Wyatt pursues the specter of his lost love and crosses paths with the citizens of this down-at-its-heels market town as they struggle to grasp the all-consuming obsessions, ghosts, and X-factors that confound their days. Thought-provoking yet dryly humorous, Sallowsfield weaves diverse elements into a story both light-hearted and philosophical, exploring along the way universal human touchstones of obsession, ruined love and the inexplicable mysteries that shape our lives.

From the sandy pine hills and river bluffs of North Louisiana to the cypress swamps and reedy marshes of South Louisiana—from the Ozarks to the Gulf—David Middleton celebrates, in evocative descriptions and compelling stories, the flora and fauna, the history and prehistory, the geography and the people, of his native state. But like Robert Frost’s New England or Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, Middleton’s Louisiana becomes the locale of readily sharable universal human experiences: love, death, war, religion, art, family, and friends. Standing atop Driskill Mountain, the highest point of elevation in Louisiana, the poet-as-fiddler affirms his calling in life:  For that’s what bow and strings are for,To raise things up in songBetween The Fall and ParadisAnd urge the world along.Taken as a whole, the poems in this volume confirm Middleton as the preeminent inheritor among living poets of the Southern Agrarian Literary Tradition. In addition to the full poems of Middleton’s previously published works*, Time Will Tell includes 50 years of selected, new, uncollected, and previously unpublished poems, written 1973-2023. *The Burning Fields (LSU Press, 1991), Beyond the Chandeleurs (LSU Press, 1999), The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems After Pictures by Jean-FranÇois Millet (LSU Press, 2005), The Fiddler of Driskill Hill (LSU Press, 2013), Outside the Gates of Eden (Measure Press, 2021).

From the sandy pine hills and river bluffs of North Louisiana to the cypress swamps and reedy marshes of South Louisiana—from the Ozarks to the Gulf—David Middleton celebrates, in evocative descriptions and compelling stories, the flora and fauna, the history and prehistory, the geography and the people, of his native state. But like Robert Frost’s New England or Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, Middleton’s Louisiana becomes the locale of readily sharable universal human experiences: love, death, war, religion, art, family, and friends. Standing atop Driskill Mountain, the highest point of elevation in Louisiana, the poet-as-fiddler affirms his calling in life:  For that’s what bow and strings are for,To raise things up in songBetween The Fall and ParadisAnd urge the world along.Taken as a whole, the poems in this volume confirm Middleton as the preeminent inheritor among living poets of the Southern Agrarian Literary Tradition. In addition to the full poems of Middleton’s previously published works*, Time Will Tell includes 50 years of selected, new, uncollected, and previously unpublished poems, written 1973-2023. *The Burning Fields (LSU Press, 1991), Beyond the Chandeleurs (LSU Press, 1999), The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems After Pictures by Jean-FranÇois Millet (LSU Press, 2005), The Fiddler of Driskill Hill (LSU Press, 2013), Outside the Gates of Eden (Measure Press, 2021).

Set in Galveston during the 1900 storm, the most devastating natural disaster in the history of the United States, this sweeping novel follows the fates of several richly drawn characters. And it is the story of Galveston herself, the grand old lady of the Gulf Coast, with her harbor filled with ships from the world over; her Victorian homes and her brothels and her grand pavilions set in their own parks; and her stately mansions along Broadway, the highest ground on the island, at eight feet above sea level. All must face their darkest night now, as nature hurls the worst she can muster at the narrow strip of sand and salt grass that is doomed to become, for a time, part of the ocean floor. This is the story of heroes and villains, of courage and sacrifice and, most of all, of people trying desperately to survive. And it is the story of an era now gone, of splendor and injustice, filled with the simple joy of living. For the first time in hardcover, The 25th Anniversary Edition includes a new preface from the author.

Proprioception tastes of a feral urgency to time, to presence, a need. The poems move through ideas of race, of fear, of sexuality, of life already lived in low-level terror now amplified, of the weight of responsibility, of the burdens of age—trying to find a way to breathe every day in a now permanent upset of an already shaky imbalance, to find new position in spaces erupting with old hate, old jealousies, old greeds.

River Hymnal offers rivers as connective tissue binding Louisiana, Washington, and Florida together. Poems are set in all these locales, and their landscapes shape and contain different permeations of the poet’s life and sensibilities. The book’s themes of discovery and loss, progress and regress, future and past, are all rivers that the poems alchemize into a confluence of water that currents the poet continually around the next bend in his life and memory.

In the 1980s, twelve-year-old Matthew Cooper is experiencing some strange and terrifying events at an old rental house where he and his family have recently moved. TVs and radios click on and off in the middle of the night. Odd shapes are drawn in the foggy glass of a bathroom mirror. No one can explain these things, and as their encounters become more bizarre and intense, Matthew's family slowly descends into darkness and paranoia, the psychological horror becoming more of a threat than what might be lurking behind their walls.

The Berceuse International Youth League & The St. Herménégilde Society for General Upkeep & Social Benefaction Presents A Melancholic Fantasia in the Tradition of Lonely Swamp Pop, a Collage of the Culture & Peculiar History of Our Parish as Figured in the Tragicomic Soleil Family, Especially Our Unofficial Town Poet Laureate, Burnside Soleil, in Conjunction with Gus Babineaux, an Historian of Dubious Origins & Compiler of This Fine Book, Berceuse Parish

What Flesh Inherits is a meditation on home, identity, belief, and the ways in which small-town Texas culture has shaped Brownlee's own origin story, as well as the experiences and stories of the friends and family members in the town where he grew up (Llano, TX, population 3,033). Readers are introduced to not only Brownlee's Hill Country roots and memories, but also a quasi-gospel exploring the life, death, and resurrection of Aron Anderson, a fictional character introduced midway through the book who is assembled from the people and landscape that defined the poet's childhood. Brownlee and Anderson's voices join a chorus of unexpected speakers in this collection that include grasshoppers, deer, coyotes, catfish, and other Hill Country creatures and spirits, teaching us what it means to belong even when we feel, at times, like exiles in familiar places.The Sabine Series in Literature, No. 14