Books and Anthologies Let it Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems Autumn House Press • Order Online at Amazon.com • Editorial Review From Mary Swander Sheryl St. Germain’s poetry is filled with sensual delight, with the enjoyment of good food, good company, and good music. While she travels the world, St. Germain returns again and again to her native New Orleans, to the bonds of family and the forces of nature that break through and spill over human walls and barriers. In Let it Be a Dark Roux, St. Germain teaches us how to embrace all the currents of life‹its pleasures, its sorrows, its inevitable challenge to step out into the street and take up the dance once more. Swamp Songs: the Making of an Unruly Woman University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, TX • Order Online at Amazon.com • Editorial Review From Publishers Weekly Landscape shapes this collection of essays by the New Orleans-born and bred poet St. Germain (The Journals of Scheherazade). While her family has all the earmarks of a troubled one-"drugs, alcoholism, sex, murder, suicide"-their tale is merely the frame within which St. Germain has constructed a memoir of and dirge for a place: Louisiana. St. Germain brings these essays together with little disjunction and few repetitions. In her telling, family data are often blurry and family versions of events can differ (e.g., why and how Grandfather shot his eye out). Place, however, is unmistakable and tangible. St. Germain's passionate commitment to place is the lens through which she conveys the specialness of growing up in the Louisiana swampland, where Christmas celebrations, amusement parks, meals and even fishing are as ordained by the landscape as hurricanes, which can wreak "almost one and a half billion dollars worth of damage," and Mardi Gras, that time when the uptown streets become so clogged St. Germain sits on her friend's shoulders, "lifted high and parentless above the swaggering crowds." St. Germain succeeds in simultaneously offering a sensitive memoir and an homage to Louisiana's swamps, the people who dwell near them and New Orleans. ©2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. The Journals of Scheherazade The University of North Texas Press, Denton, TX • Order Online at Amazon.com • Editorial Review From The Redneck Review of Literature "Whereas poets such as Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds heartily achieve their numerous effects by shocking the reader with language formerly unacceptable within women’s discourse, Sheryl St. Germain attacks these same subject areas via a clean elegance of language and close attention to rhythm. These are not so much ‘confessional’ poems, as women are accused of writing, but works which reach the universal heart of humankind and are... worthy of a Ferlinghetti mindset in terms of social impact." –Penelope Reedy, editor and publisher of The Redneck Review of Literature How Heavy the Breath of God The University of North Texas Press, Denton, TX • Order Online at Amazon.com • Editorial Reviews "St. Germain personalizes nature, and her relationship to it, in the way that Adrienne Rich has encouraged us to do. She refuses patriarchal objectifying, fetishizing, or romanticizing in favor of a primarily non-anthropomorphic embodiment... where humans, in body and spirit, are recognized as part of nature." — Spoon River Poetry Review. "I do not think I have ever encountered a poet less self-consciously or more powerfully female. St. Germain does not try to intellectualize or abstract her gender; neither does she try to escape from it." — Burton Raffel, The Literary Review Making Bread at Midnight Slough Press, Austin, TX (Out of print) • Order Online at Amazon.com • Editorial Review from Amazon.com Sheryl is the archetype of woman. Her poetry breathes the breath of a woman who has had children, who has known love, death, betrayal, passion, and all those great things, but never does one feel a tinge of bitterness. Sheryl drinks life in all its forms as if at a wine tasting. She chews each bit of experience as one trying a new bread, a new gumbo recipe. She offers you a bit to chew, and it becomes a part of you. You are changed afterward. It's sad that her books can fall into obscurity. I have most of them, bought them from her or a local bookstore which carried them when she published them. She autographed them for me, and I feel as if they are treasures. More than treasures. They are food. Now and then I get a strange hunger that cannot be satiated. Eventually, her books find their way to my desk again, and I am filled once more. Jesus fed the multitudes with a basket of fish and loaves. Sheryl is not Jesus, but with her little stack of poems, her few books, she could feed the multitudes in a way that might finally fill that something which has been missing for so long. If only... Going Home Perivale Press, Van Nuys, CA (Out of print) Je Suis Cadien Translation from the Cajun French, Jean Arceneaux Cross-Cultural Communications, Merrick, NY • Order Online at Amazon.com • Order from publisher Cross Cultural Communications Press/239 Wynsum Avenue Merrick, NY 11566-4725 (516) 868-5635 (phone) The Mask of Medusa Translation from the Cajun French, Jean Arceneaux Cross-Cultural Communications, Merrick, NY • Order Online at Amazon.com • Order from publisher Cross Cultural Communications Press/239 Wynsum Avenue Merrick, NY 11566-4725 (516) 868-5635 (phone) Anthologies All of the anthologies listed below can be order directly from Amazon.com. Simply click on the title and we will send you directly to the page at Amazon.com. The Berkeley Literary Women's Revolution) Editors Marsha Hudson, Bridget Connelly, Doris Earnshaw, Olivia Eilson and Judy Wells McFarland & Co, 2004 Christmas Stories from Louisiana Editors Dorothy Doge Robbins and Kenneth Robbins University of Mississippi Press, 2003 In the Middle of the Middle West: An Anthology of Creative Non-fiction Editor Becky Bradway Indiana University Press, 2003 Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems Editors Brooke Horvath and Time Wiles University of Southern Illinois Press, 2002 Illinois Voices: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Poetry Editors Kevin Stein and G.E. Murray University of Illinois Press, 2001 Rape, Battery, Incest: Women Writing Out The Pain Editor Miriam Harris Texas Christian University Press, 2000 Best Texas Writing 2 Editor Brian Clements Denton: Firewheel Editions, 1999 Outsiders: Poems about Rebels, Exiles, and Renegades Editor Laure-Anne Bosselaar Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1999 Uncommonplace: An Anthology of Contemporary Louisiana Poets Editor Ann Dobie Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1998 Night Out Editors Kurt Brown and Laure-Anne Bosslear Minneapolis: Milkweed, 1997 Inheritance of Light Editor Ray Gonzalez University of North Texas Press, 1996 A Certain Attitude: Seven Texas Women Editor Laura Kenneley San Antonio: Pecan Grove Press, 1995 Drive, they said Editor Kurt Brown Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1994 Gulf Coast Stories and Poems Editors James White and Jeff Todd Texas Center for Writers Press, Montrose, Alabama, 1994 Epiphanies: The Prose Poem Now Cumberland, 1988