'The Louisiana backdrops of these poems are not the moss-draped oaks and iron-festooned balconies of a thousand tourist brochures, but gritty snapshots of junkyards, ?junque? shops, honky-tonks, trailer parks, bingo palaces, casinos, washaterias, and toxin-poisoned bayous. Through these dismal landscapes wander a surprising pair of literary ghosts: French convict-poet, Fran&#1195;ois Villon, feeling thoroughly at home with his fellow sinners, and Chinese scholar-poet Li-Po, drunkenly searching for his lost pastoral world. It's about time that Southern ?grit lit? crossed over from fiction into poetry, and Alison Pelegrin is just the poet to pull it off.'Julie Kane, author of Rhythm and Boozefor more infohttp://concretewolf.com editors@concretewolf.com

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Alison Pelegrin

Concrete Wolf / Frost Heaves Press

Alison Pelegrin is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Waterlines with LSU Press. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Louisiana Division of the Arts, recent work of hers appears in The Southern Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Image. She teaches at Southeastern Louisiana University. This collection vibrates with candor and concern-forging a kinetic blaze into an emotional and physical terrain newly devastated by hurricane. But oh, what gorgeous life and sass teems in these poems! Whether she writes of the exquisite delight of eating "a foam of jeweled fruits" or the horrors of "...unzipped bodies, emptied and stacked by size," Pelegrin's writing is simply incandescent. Aimee Nezhukumatathil Our Lady of the Flood sets before its altars all the rapturous junk and glorious miscellany of a world both rooted in tradition and constantly in flux. Alison Pelegrin dazzles us, once again, with a richness of experience that makes us hunger "for fig cookies, glossy loaves of bread, and for ambrosia, / confection snubbed by food snobs / as a poor folks food," and introduces us to Our Lady of the Flood herself, asking, "Lady, is that you, with a citronella halo, / ghosting the mud-milk waters / with a laundry basket of kittens in one arm?" The divine and the ordinary intersect and intertwine throughout this collection, while a steady, spirited voice shows us "a tangle of bridges," or "the ghost of wind lurching through kudzu leaves," and "the movement of a horse minus the horse itself." Readers, prepare to be astonished and transformed. Alison Pelegrin's Our Lady of the Flood is the answer to our prayers. Mary Biddinger

Our Lady of the Flood

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Books by Alison Pelegrin

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Alison Pelegrin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

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Our Lady of the Flood