A finalist for the Donald Justice Prize, Jennifer Reeser’s third volume ranges from the light and amusing to the weighted and anguished. Twenty-seven of the poems in this collection present a tragicomic dialogue with William Shakespeare, through the persona of the Dark Lady addressed in his latter sonnets. Over seventy others present portraits-in-poetry of shops, performers and vendors in the famous French Quarter of New Orleans: candelabras, Carnival and cockroaches; the catastrophic events of the Louisiana hurricanes of 2005, and that state’s ensuing environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. By diverse styles and forms, from the ghazal and villanelle to sapphics to sonnets to the limerick, in blank verse and rhyme, in modes lyric, narrative and dramatic, the author communicates on love, faith, family, psychology, fashion, art and the forces of Nature; and not through her poems alone, but also through those of the French symbolist Charles Baudelaire, whose translations she offers in English form similar to those French versions in which they were first composed. This collection includes poems and translations previously published in such magazines and journals as The National Review, POETRY, LIGHT: A Quarterly of Light Verse, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, First Things, The Dark Horse, Unsplendid, Mezzo Cammin, American Arts Quarterly, Able Muse and MEASURE. It contains, as well, numerous nominees for the Pushcart and Best of the Net prize anthologies, with a foreword written by Australian editor, Paul Stevens, and with recommendations from National Review literary editor, Michael Potemra; Yale Scholar of the House in Poetry and author of Mortal Stakes / Faint Thunder, Timothy Murphy; and TRINACRIA editor, New York University professor, Dr. Joseph S. Salemi.

Sonnets from the Dark Lady and Other Poems

Literature & Fiction

Reeser, Jennifer

Poetry

Saint James Infirmary Books

Ghosts, devils, grave-robbers, killers, lovers, pirates, and dead Rock-and-Rollers. These are only some of the inhabitants of Jason Phillip Reeser's short story collection Cities of the Dead. Each of these thirteen stories is set in one of the many above-ground cemeteries in New Orleans where the dead refuse to be buried. Not every story has a ghost, but every story is haunted by the inevitable ghosts that lurk in the shadows terrorizing our darkest corners: regret, guilt, fear, obsession, despair, failure, and loneliness.

Cities of the Dead

Reeser, Jason Phillip

Literary

If Jason and Jennifer Reeser were going to indulge their life-long fantasy of visiting Paris, they weren't going to play by the rules; no hotels, no guided tours, and none of those four-day-and-three-night packages. They would live in the City of Light as if they belonged.  Setting aside two weeks in April, they ignored the experts and set out to find a Room With Paris View. "When you first encounter a city or a woman or a good book, you learn more about them, and fall in love with them the more you discover, but you will never quite match that moment when you first encountered them, knowing you had found something extraordinary and realizing how exciting it would be to explore the city or hold the woman in your arms or read the book to its very last page."   —excerpt from Room With Paris View

Room With Paris View

Travel

Europe

Cited as a resource by world-renowned, French criminologist, Stéphane Bourgoin, a foremost authority on serial killers. Twice Nominated for Literature's Pushcart Prize. On April 10, 1834, fire erupted at the mansion of wealthy, beautiful, twice-widowed socialite Madame Marie Delphine Lalaurie, a Creole of French and Irish heritage living on Royal Street in the famed French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana. First responders discovered seven slaves in the attic, victims of her torture chained to the mansion walls. They were rescued, though to this day, at least nineteen slaves belonging to Madame Lalaurie remain vanished without a trace, and the roster of slave children, adults and elderly who mysteriously died in her care is considerable, though the lady herself escaped prosecution and was never brought to justice. Reports of hauntings and strange sights at the mansion have persisted through its 200 year history, with a long list of owners -- from humble school instructors to Hollywood stars such as the actor Nicolas Cage -- who each abandoned the house after a relatively short time, following a timeline of unfortunate events. At present, the Lalaurie Mansion is considered among the loveliest of homes in the United States of America, and reputed to be one of its most haunted, as well. Jennifer Reeser conducts a spellbinding, poetic "ghost tour" through its chambers, exploring the real culture, cuisine, history, mythology and art unique to New Orleans, while at the same time creating an original story and fictional plot, told in a straightforward, classic form full of feeling, which should be clear to anyone, anywhere in the world. Readers will encounter such characters as Calavera, the Baron Samedi, and even Madame Lalaurie, herself. What the literary journal, TRINACRIA, has described as, "...an amazing terza rima narrative of a tour through an old haunted house, done in unnerving Grand Guignol style."

The Lalaurie Horror

This book - the author's fifth collection - contains new translations of Charles Baudelaire, poems of Paris, verses for the victims at Charlie Hebdo, poems of New Orleans, and more. These poems have appeared in journals such as the Paris digital revue, "Levure Litteraire," in Europe's leading literary e-zine, "Recours au Poeme," in American academic journals such as "Able Muse" and "THINK," in mass publications such as "The Writer," "The National Review," and others. With a foreword by French scholar and Baudelaire authority, Kathryn Oliver Mills. “The breath of Paris pushes at my shutters,” writes Jennifer Reeser, twenty-first-century flâneuse and elegant, rhyming translator of the great 19th-century French poet, Charles Baudelaire. Fleur-de-Lis is an example of how deeply a European city and that city’s poet can enter an American writer’s heart. Though Jennifer Reeser is no innocent abroad and hardly “maudit”—she is deeply Christian—the ghost of the nineteenth century haunts the cadences of this immensely talented, stylish, New-Orleans-based formalist whose work confronts “the malformations of her soul” (Fleur-de-Lis / Fleurs du Mal): I have seen queens’ swans, moved a man to cry, heard Bach played in the Metro on guitars. I have made love in Paris. Let me die. All of the nineteenth century is here, but filtered through a sophisticated, twenty-first-century sensibility, constantly moving between what was and what is. The journey is fascinating, rich, knowing, and endlessly circumfluent. Though Reeser is “besotted” with Jesus, she dives deeply into darkness as well, and boundaries (herself / Baudelaire, New Orleans / Paris) fade. She is—as Baudelaire said of his flâneur —“a mirror as vast as the crowd itself…a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness” ("The Painter of Modern Life"). -- Jack Foley

Fleur de Lis