Summoning Our Saints

Reviews / Votes

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. * Choice Reviews * 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. -- Herman Beavers, Professor of English and African American Studies, University of Pennsylvania 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. -- Dana Williams, Howard University 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. -- Tara T. Green, University of North Carolina at Greensboro