Fleur de Lis - Softcover

Reeser, Jennifer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0692766499 ISBN 13: 9780692766491

Publisher: Saint James Infirmary Books, 2016

Synopsis

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

About this title

About the Author

Jennifer Reeser is author of An Alabaster Flask, (winner of the Word Press First Book Prize), Winterproof, Sonnets from the Dark Lady and Other Poems, (a finalist for the Donald Justice Prize), and bestselling epic, The Lalaurie Horror. Her poems, critical essays, and translations of Cherokee, French and Russian literature have appeared in journals including Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Formalist, Light Quarterly, Able Muse, The National Review and The Dark Horse, and have been gathered in anthologies such as Measure for Measure, in Penguin/Random House Publisher’s Everyman’s Library series, in Longman's textbook, An Introduction to Poetry (edited by X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia), and Poets Translate Poets: A Hudson Review Anthology. She is a mentor on faculty with the West Chester Poetry Conference, and lives amid the bayous of southern Louisiana with the fiction writer, Jason Reeser, and her black cat, Baca.

Edition details

• Publisher: Saint James Infirmary Books
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0692766499
• ISBN 13: 9780692766491
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 92