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THIS IS A PAGE THAT CAN START ANY LOVER OF POETRY
ON A JOURNEY INTO THE HEART OF LOUISIANA.
I HOPE YOU ENJOY THESE BOOKS.
Diving Into Nature is an anthology about Louisiana’s bayous, estuaries and fields. In the haunts of the ivory-billed woodpecker, pelicans, ospreys, alligators, and owls are brought to life within pages colored by the imagination and reproduced in inks that can not save them from the chemical spills and thick smogs that envelop us. Portal Press has gathered poems from poets across the state (including multiple poet laureates) to overwhelm us with syllables that balance joyfull choruses with warnings so that readers can savor the thrall of Louisiana as pesticides and churlish cancers overtake us. This book is a banquet of fauna and flora that need a voice before they succumb to what seems inevitable. Buy this anthology now; for the sake of love, read these poems now, before what beauty we have goes from endangered to extinct.
Gina Ferrara’s collection Amiss might be subtitled, “American Femicide”: these lyric poems are sympathetic, even intimate, elegies for, and apostrophes to, women killed or missing in every state in the Union, and our North American landscape (beautifully evoked), seems involved in their fates. Notice, for instance, how often the vaunted freedom of the road turns out to be something else for these passengers: women “driven in the direction / of what always goes wrong.” Notice, also, the details, as Ferrara chooses her images with the fierce attention of an angelic detective—a bright blue van, a bible, a deck of cards spilled from an abandoned purse—so that an earned and grounded empathy propels the clear voice, along with the desire for justice. In these quick and vivid poems Ferrara makes of grief an illuminating fire, from which the poet speaks of and to the missing and dead women with exemplary, tenderly respectful, imagination, memory, and knowledge. I have so much admiration for this poet’s courage—Ferrara has gone among the ghosts and faced the terror every woman in our violent homeland spends a significant portion of her life trying not to think about.
Gina Ferrara is the current Poet Laureate of Louisiana. She has five poetry collections including her latest, Amiss, published by Dos Madres Press in 2023. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Callaloo, The Poetry Ireland Review and The Southern Review and nominated for a Best of the Net and a Pushcart in 2024. Since 2007, she has curated The Poetry Buffet, a monthly reading series in New Orleans. She teaches at Delgado Community College and lives near Bayou St. John with her husband, Jonathan Kline, and their bulldog.
From Amazonian jungles, to peaks in Peru, to trails in Ecuador, to jaunts through the American South, these poems sizzle with clarity and insight like the jangle of bells hanging around an alpaca’s neck on a steep mountain trail. I promise you’ll cherish the time you spend following these lines around the world.
Authors Statement: With “In the Wind” I wanted to portray travel as it actually happens and to avoid any ordinary travelogue. In the aggregate, I strove to move from personal memory into more universal experiences. Granted, some of this sites are among the most beautiful and historic places in the world. I have tried to bring them home on a personal level while still expressing their grandeur.
I include things which happen to travelers such as getting lost in new city or running into the same taxi driver twice in one day in a city of millions. Poetry gave me the avenue to lead the reader from external to internal landscapes (soul to soil) and back again. I hope that my poems evoke places you have been or make you want to travel to new places. More importantly, I hope that the spiritual transitions that a traveler goes through on the road are brought home inside these pages.
Bio
Ed Ruzicka’s fourth book, “In the Wind” was released in the spring of 2025. His poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, the Chicago Literary Review, Rattle and countless others. Ed has had poems nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has been a finalist for the Dana Award. Ed is president of the Poetry Society of Louisiana. He lives under live oak trees in Baton Rouge, LA with his wife, Renee.
In Border Crossings, Raymond Berthelot’s poems show us snapshots of scenes from around the world, and intermittently of the Deep South. In these short, precise narrative poems, Berthelot finds beauty in the details of even the most unforgiving landscapes, and he sings to us with a language so evocative and true, it’s easy to lose oneself in the blossoming, often deadly worlds he creates. These eye opening, well-crafted poems by Raymond Berthelot reveal our need for peace and tranquility, give us hope and make us listen to free jazz.
Who are Black Creoles? Saloy’s new poems address ancestral connections to contemporary life, traditions celebrated, New Orleans Black life today, Louisiana Black life today, enduring and surviving hurricanes, romance, #BlackLivesMatter, #wematter, as well as poems of the pandemic lockdown from New Orleans. Saloy’s collection of verse advances and updates narratives of Black life to now, including day-to-day Black speech, the lives of culture keepers, and family tales. These poems detail cultural and historical memory of enslavement not taught and offer healing and hope for tomorrow. Saloy does it all with grace and clarity in these often musical poems.
On a personal note, I know Mona Lise Saloy to be one of the most engaging, lively and loving people on the globe. Only she could write with such frank care and bring these histories to life.
This historic and engaging anthology provides revelational insight into one of the most impactful events in New Orleans’ past. Whether you stayed in the city, left to avoid the hurricane’s impact or just love “the Big Easy” you will find these poems riveting.
This anthology is edited by two former Poet Laureates of Louisiana, John Warner Smith and Mona Lisa Saloy.
The Poetry Buffet Anthology is a collection of writing from nearly 100 poets of & near New Orleans as well as a celebration of The Poetry Buffet monthly reading series, now in its sixteenth year, hosted by Gina Ferrara at the Latter Library on Saint Charles Avenue. There is no better way to learn about the breadth and depth of New Orlean’s poetry scene than to read these poems aloud.
Featured poets include: Darrell Bourque, Peter Cooley, Mona Lisa Saloy, Julie Kane, Alison Pelegrin, Gina Ferrara, Rodger Kamenetz, David Havard, Malaika Favorite, Grace Bauer, Brad Richard, Jonathan Penton, Ed Ruzicka, Skye Jackson, Bill Lavender, and many others.
Poet Laureate of Louisiana Gina Ferrara has mined a trove of brilliant works. The Poetry Buffet Anthology is a Mardi Gras Fest in words.
Benjamin Lowenkron’s poems place the reader at sundown at Bone River with a hatchet and a cassock. Where do we go when the spirit leaves us in the moonlight at the crossroads? How many steps before we realize that we cannot escape them, that we will carry the crossroads with us forever? When the waters rise and breach the levee; when the sun fills the land with blood; when your dreams are baptized in the current; when the chorus on the far bank sings out your name; when everything around you rises from the grave, Bone River has flooded your days.
David Havird is the author of three collections: Penelope’s Design (Texas Review Press, 2010), which won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize; Map Home (Texas Review Press, 2013); and Weathering (Mercer University Press, 2020), which includes prose memoir as well as poetry. His poems and essays have been published in such periodicals as Agni, The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, Plume, Raritan, and The Yale Review.
He retired from the classroom in 2020 after 30 years at Centenary College of Louisiana. He lives with his wife, the poet and novelist
Ashley Mace Havird, in Shreveport.
“What a generous and finely crafted book David Havird’s Weathering is.”
—B. H. Fairchild, author of The New Buick: New and Selected Poems
“An indispensable collection, whose tonic chord is memory.”
—David Yezzi, author of More Things in Heaven: New and Selected Poems and Late Romance:
Anthony Hecht—A Poet’s Life
Turned Earth, the fifth collection of poems by Brad Richard, offers a portrait of the artist as a grieving son who is also a husband, teacher, gardener, and attentive witness to our precarious world. Navigating life after his mother’s death, the speaker uses memory and imagination to understand, as one poem’s title declares, “How I Came to This.” Tender and trenchant, elegiac yet often livened by humor, Richard’s poems affirm the sustaining power of hope and love.
