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

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.""

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.