Summoning Our Saints: The Poetry and Prose of Brenda Marie Osbey celebrates and illuminates the poetry and prose of one of the South’s and the nation’s most notable writers. A native of New Orleans and a former poet laureate of Louisiana who served magnificently in that function during the dark days after Hurricane Katrina, Osbey has summoned up a magical, beguiling, sometimes chilling and appalling portrait of the myriad chapters of New Orleans, Southern, and hemispheric history. Her dazzling narratives offer apertures into desire, death and remembrance, often through the voices of neglected and abused citizens. The essays in this collection examine Osbey’s essays and poetry collections, situating them within greater traditions of African American women’s writing, blues music, and West African religious traditions and Catholicism. The chapters are punctuated throughout with Osbey’s own reflections on her work and bring a long-needed and appreciative critical focus to a great artist, elucidating her contributions to our common cultural heritage. The book examines Osbey’s meditations on topics such as colonization, the African diaspora, the circumCaribbean, and contemporary parallels between Europe and the United States to showcase the ways in which they add valuable new insights to transnational studies.

Another lively, eclectic 150 page collection of poems celebrating the author's 65th birthday. Includes haiku and longer performance pieces; provocative, humorous, visionary. In three sections, most originally composed on a smartphone, between 2011 & Dec. 2013. (This is the author's 9th book of poetry.)

An eclectic collection of new poetry including an innovative "text-in-body" section. Topics range from the highly controversial and political (as well as disturbingly, intimately personal) to the softly humorous and quietly meditative. To be performed and / or not. Illustrations & b/w photographs (by author).

In her enchanting poem sequence, Doris Davenport introduces readers to Soque Street and its ""Affrilachian"" residents. These African Americans inhabiting an Appalachian community in northeast Georgia live in a world where magic threads daily life and the living and dead commingle. Ghosts, self-propelled caskets, and sensate trees are as natural as morning glories to these characters, who are at once eccentric and universal, peculiar and welcoming. Spoken in intersecting and overlapping monologues, the poems create a refreshing portrait of small-town life, with its mix of quotidian concerns and the larger experiences of love, passion, grief, jealousy, and madness. The story of Soque Street moves from voice to voice and through poetic forms with ease and confidence. Sometimes frightening, often funny, and always compelling and potent, madness like morning glories is a major achievement by a poet of tremendous originality who possesses an intuition for the subtle secrets of language.