Bøger af Jennifer Reeser

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.

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

Cited as a resource by world-renowned, French criminologist, Stéphane Bourgoin, a foremost authority on serial killers. 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."

In Strong Feather, Jennifer Reeser revisits the salient themes of Indigenous-her acclaimed, award-winning preceding poetry collection. While the poems in Strong Feather reprise the exposition of a Native American heritage juxtaposed with a mixed European ancestry, many of them center on a Native American female character of the author's creation-a poet/prophet/warrior of sorts. Displaying a masterful command of form throughout, Strong Feather also includes personal poems, translations, and tales from Cherokee and other indigenous traditions. The result is a spellbinding and uniquely engaging collection of storytelling, mythmaking, and inspirational musings, energized by a keenly interrogated mixed-race heritage.End of the winter, middle March,Waking, I find it beneath my quiltClinging to linens the hue of larch,Softer and whiter than milk when spilt-One petite feather. Its hollow "hilt"Pointing toward me, is curved and long,Slightly translucent, and at a tilt.How has this feather stayed so strong?. . . .PRAISE FOR STRONG FEATHER:What I love most about Jennifer Reeser's poems is their swagger. Not conceit (there's none of that) but rather a delightful confidence in her art and in her judgments. Maybe that's communicated by the title of her new book, before we even get to the first poem. Can a feather be strong? You better believe it.-John Wilson, Englewood Review of Books + Marginalia Review of BooksJennifer Reeser's Strong Feather continues her personal legacy of applying classical technique to make another world visible. Like Countee Cullen of the Harlem renaissance, she is a master of rhyming forms that present life beyond the expected edges of formal verse. Witness the marvelous "Shape Shifter," a Petrarchan sonnet like no other, or the stunning "The Courier du Bois and the Savage," an ekphrastic poem written as an English ode but conveying a modern message about equality. Her elegant use of rhyming couplets in "White Lady" concentrate the poem's illumination of contrasting lives. A hundred pages of such treasures will bring you lives you might not otherwise meet and pleasures you would otherwise miss.-Arthur Mortensen, Expansive Poetry OnlineABOUT THE AUTHOR:Jennifer Reeser is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently, Strong Feather (Able Muse Press, 2022), and Indigenous (Able Muse Press, 2019), which was awarded Best Poetry Book of 2019 by Englewood Review of Books. Reeser's poems, reviews, and translations of Russian, French, along with the Cherokee and various Native American Indian languages, have appeared in Poetry, Rattle, the Hudson Review, Recours au Poème, Light Quarterly, the Formalist, the Dark Horse, SALT, Able Muse, and elsewhere. A biracial writer of European American and Native American Indian ancestry, Reeser was born in Louisiana and now divides her time between Louisiana and her land on the Cherokee Reservation in Indian Country near Tahlequah, Oklahoma, capital of the Cherokee Nation of which her family is a part.

This book - the author's fifth collection - contains new translations of Charles Baudelaire, poems of Paris, verses for the victims at Charlie Hebdo, poems of New Orleans, and more. These poems have appeared in journals such as the Paris digital revue, "Levure Litteraire," in Europe's leading literary e-zine, "Recours au Poeme," in American academic journals such as "Able Muse" and "THINK," in mass publications such as "The Writer," "The National Review," and others. With a foreword by French scholar and Baudelaire authority, Kathryn Oliver Mills. "The breath of Paris pushes at my shutters," writes Jennifer Reeser, twenty-first-century flâneuse and elegant, rhyming translator of the great 19th-century French poet, Charles Baudelaire. Fleur-de-Lis is an example of how deeply a European city and that city's poet can enter an American writer's heart. Though Jennifer Reeser is no innocent abroad and hardly "maudit"-she is deeply Christian-the ghost of the nineteenth century haunts the cadences of this immensely talented, stylish, New-Orleans-based formalist whose work confronts "the malformations of her soul" (Fleur-de-Lis / Fleurs du Mal): I have seen queens' swans, moved a man to cry, heard Bach played in the Metro on guitars. I have made love in Paris. Let me die. All of the nineteenth century is here, but filtered through a sophisticated, twenty-first-century sensibility, constantly moving between what was and what is. The journey is fascinating, rich, knowing, and endlessly circumfluent. Though Reeser is "besotted" with Jesus, she dives deeply into darkness as well, and boundaries (herself / Baudelaire, New Orleans / Paris) fade. She is-as Baudelaire said of his flâneur -"a mirror as vast as the crowd itself...a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness" ("The Painter of Modern Life"). -- Jack Foley

Jennifer Reeser’s Indigenous is, by turns, a celebration of her Native American heritage and a lamentation decrying the social injustice and tragedies endured. Through Reeser’s sublime craft and formal prowess, ancestral memories and spirits—both the immediate and the historical—are visited with chants, prayers, or rituals: be it imagined, culled, or translated in the backdrop of history, myth, and lore. Reeser also immerses us in her mixed-race heritage, in the “bloody war/ Inside of me, between the Red and White.” This collection is as uniquely inspirational and thought-provoking as it is fun—a collection not to be missed.PRAISE FOR INDIGENOUSThe beauty of this collection of poems is the way it uses every device capable of reaching the reader. These poems go behind the familiar: Wounded Knee, the Trail of Tears, figures such as Sequoyah and Chief Joseph; past the artifacts, legends, and folkways encountered through reading and travels across America, to the intimate details of a specific family and their lives and world seen from the inside. They give, as our literature seldom does, moral weight to the real and living representatives of those nations, rather than to the romanticized or demonized figures imagined by film. In all, Indigenous is more than simply a good read, or a compelling account of events we need to know better: it’s an addition to our national literature by Jennifer Reeser—an accomplished poet who knows, and understands intimately, what she is so generously sharing in her work.—Rhina P. Espaillat, author of And After AllJennifer Reeser’s new book of poems, Indigenous, provokes a strange sensation in the reader: an alien yet familiar landscape peopled with recurring characters, the mingling ghosts of history haunting the here and now and reanimating the myth and lore of her folk, both tragic and comic—as inseparable from Reeser’s imagination as they are from her blood. Each poem enters into dialogue with the reader even as it maintains an ongoing conversation of sound and sense with the other poems in the collection, a steady, sturdy examination of essential tensions: what it means to be a descendant of the First Nations, an heir to Christian grace, and a poet writing in modern American.Already a master of poetic forms, Reeser has reapplied her talent in what amounts to a major development in her repertoire, bringing the reader to that Native American borderland of the heart that has apparently been a major part of her life, but a part we’ve only seen in glimpses up to now.—Joseph O’Brien, poetry editor of the San Diego ReaderABOUT THE AUTHOR:Jennifer Reeser is the author of five collections of poetry. Her first, An Alabaster Flask, was the winner of the Word Press First Book Prize. X. J. Kennedy wrote that her debut “ought to have been a candidate for a Pulitzer.” Her third, Sonnets from the Dark Lady and Other Poems, was a finalist for the Donald Justice Prize. Her fourth, The Lalaurie Horror, debuted as an Amazon bestseller in the category of Epic Poetry. Reeser’s poems, reviews, and translations of Russian, French, along with the Cherokee and various Native American Indian languages, have appeared in POETRY, Rattle, the Hudson Review, Recours au Poème, LIGHT Quarterly, the Formalist, the Dark Horse, SALT, Able Muse, and elsewhere. A biracial writer of Anglo-Celtic and Native American Indian ancestry, Reeser was born in Louisiana. She studied English at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and also in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her former home.