Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
All Saints: New and Selected Poems

All Saints: New and Selected Poems

Osbey, Brenda Marie

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $23.95

ISBN10: 0807121983
ISBN13: 9780807121986
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: Nov 1 1997
Pages: 144
Weight: 0.51
Height: 0.42 Width: 5.40 Depth: 8.93
Language: English

Like the feast day recalled in its title, this collection of twenty narrative poems venerates the dead. Brenda Marie Osbey invokes, impersonates, and converses with her Afro-New Orleans forebears--both blood ancestors and spiritual predecessors--weaving in hypnotic cadence a spell as potent as the religious and magical mysteries of her native culture. In All Saints we come to believe the dead do live, in the slave bricks paving the city's faubourgs, in the Hoodoo rites and images of saints, and especially in ourselves, who walk upon the earth a living man / wearing all the shrouds of mourning like a skin / and memory like a stone inside your organs.

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. We hear Juan San Malo, leader of a slave rebellion; Luis Congo, a free Kongo man; myriad brothers and sisters, both distinct and collective; and the city itself, thrumming / eternal / ever / at the tracks. Chanting, lamenting, outpouring, healing--Osbey's poems measure her own musical refrain to the past while keeping time with the present: we cry out together / in time to hear their cries.

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