All Saints

by Osbey, Brenda Marie

• ISBN13: 9780807121986
• ISBN10: 0807121983
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-11-01
• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr

Summary

Like the feast day recalled in its title, this collection of 20 narrative poems venerates the dead. Brenda Marie Osbey invokes, impersonates, and converses with her Afro-New Orleans forebears. Assisted by a glossary of New Orleans ethnic expressions, place names, and characters, we discern in these poems a multitude of voices that speak to us from colonial times forward.

Author Biography

Brenda Marie Osbey has been a fellow of the MacDowell Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Millay Colony, and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College.

Table of Contents

For Charles H. Rowell, On the Death of His Father	p. 3
Desire and Private Griefs	p. 6
Stones of Soweto	p. 11
Alberta (Factory Poem/Variation 2)	p. 15
Another Time and Farther South	p. 20
House of the Dead Remembering (House of Mercies/Variation 2)	p. 22
Peculiar Fascination with the Dead	p. 25
Faubourg	p. 37
Faubourg Study No. 3: The Seven Sisters of New Orleans	p. 39
The Evening News: A Letter to Nina Simone	p. 54
Speaking of Trains	p. 63
Elvena	p. 70
Everything Happens to (Monk and) Me	p. 74
Mother Catherine	p. 81
St. Martin	p. 85
Sor Juana	p. 88
The Head of Luis Congo Speaks	p. 98
Expeditus	p. 104
The Business of Pursuit: San Malo's Prayer	p. 108
Suicide City	p. 115
Glossary of New Orleans Ethnic Expressions, Place Names, and Characters	p. 123
Biography	p. 128
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