Summoning Our Saints

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.

Table of Contents:
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

About the Author :
John Wharton Lowe is Barbara Methvin distinguished professor of English and Latin American and Caribbean studies at the University of Georgia.

Review :
Including a detailed chronology of its subject, this collection of essays on poet Brenda Marie Osbey (Africana studies, Brown) will be invaluable to those interested in poetry and African American studies. The collection comprises 11 critical essays. Lowe provides a detailed biographical and critical introduction, and his opening essay on Osbey's poetry collections Ceremony for Minneconjoux and In These Houses sets a high standard, one his fellow contributors meet. Thadious Davis examines History and Other Poems with authority, looking at Osbey's writing in Southern and African American traditions. Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright, who previously worked together on a study of Jesmyn Ward, place Osbey in the internationality of the Gulf of Mexico with attention to All Saints and All Souls. Daniel Cross Turner considers Osbey in conjunction with fellow poets Natasha Trethewey and Yusef Komunyakaa. In mapping and examining Osbey's poetry and prose, all the contributors recognize the centrality of Osbey's native New Orleans in her writing, with the city's pasts intersecting with the present and its extensive intercultural borders extending beyond the continental US. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. What a delightful treat! This collection of eleven essays from some of the most important critics working in African American literary and cultural studies enters into lively conversation with the poetry and prose of Brenda Marie Osbey. In essays that alternately explore Osbey’s technical mastery, innovative approaches to line, stanza, and phrase, as well as her gift for interweaving history and verse into a hybridized musical journey through time and space, we are ushered into Osbey’s poetic world as it stages a refusal to the lingering effects of European colonialism and American slavery, where spirits not only walk among us, but order our steps. Spanning the length and breadth of Osbey’s career, these essays confirm that her unique melding of spirituality and history, her explication of the spatial relations governing life on the Gulf Coast, belong in the foreground of American poetry and poetics. John Lowe has done the deft work of introducing new readers to Brenda Marie Osbey’s poetry and clarifying it to others all at once. Indeed, Lowe’s work is a summoning in its own right. He calls forth the best of our writers and critics to reveal the beauty of one of our most revered poets. As Lowe makes clear in his comprehensive and informative introduction, Brenda Marie Osbey’s poetry and essays are rooted in West African, Caribbean, and French cultural traditions, practices, and beliefs that intersect in New Orleans. To read her poetry is to undergo a pleasurable possession that allows readers to commune with the dead and to rethink how history was made. This collection stands as a supplement to Osbey’s work. In addition to an introduction that is both biographical and analytical, Lowe is joined by a cadre of poets and scholars whose essays parse out the complex nuances and rich contours of Osbey’s poetry.