All Saints: New and Selected Poems

Like the feast day recalled in its title, this collection of twenty narrative poems venerates the dead. Brenda Marie Osbey invokes, impersonates, and converses with her Afro-New Orleans forebears—both blood ancestors and spiritual predecessors—weaving in hypnotic cadence a spell as potent as the religious and magical mysteries of her native culture. In All Saints we come to believe the dead do live, in the slave bricks paving the city’s faubourgs, in the Hoodoo rites and images of saints, a...