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.
Introduction. Mapping a Starry Poetics: The Achievement of Brenda Marie Osbey John Wharton Lowe Chapter 1. The Origins of Osbey's Poetics: The Achievement of Ceremony for Minneconjoux and In These Houses John Wharton Lowe Chapter 2. "And I can see to it you stay dead / on a daily basis": Brenda Marie Osbey's Culturally Based Poetics (A poet's perspective) Doris Davenport Chapter 3. Desperate Measures Aldon Lynn Nielsen Chapter 4. Wild and Holy Women in the Poetry of Brenda Marie Osbey Andrea Benton Rushing Chapter 5. Saints of a Darker Hue in Brenda Marie Osbey's All Saints Reggie Scott Young Chapter 6. Haunted Memories: Disruptive Ghosts in the Poems of Brenda Marie Osbey Tracy Watts Chapter 7. Imagining History: Brenda Marie Osbey and the Poetics of Imagination Thadious Davis Chapter 8. Crossing the Gulf: Ecopoetic Revisions of the Coast in Brenda Marie Osbey, Natasha Trethewey, and Yusef Komunyakaa Daniel Cross Turner Chapter 9. Feeding the Gulf Dead: An Ofrenda of Response to Brenda Marie Osbey's All Saints & All Souls Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright Chapter 10. The Roots and Routes of Brenda Marie Osbey's Black Internationalism Malin Pereira Chapter 11. Introduction to 1967: On the Semicenternary of the Desegregation of the College of William and Mary Hermine Pinson Appendix: Chronology of the Life and Career of Brenda Marie Osbey About the Editor About the Contributors
