Our Lady of the Flood

Alison Pelegrin is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Waterlines with LSU Press. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Louisiana Division of the Arts, recent work of hers appears in The Southern Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Image. She teaches at Southeastern Louisiana University.

This collection vibrates with candor and concern-forging a kinetic blaze into an emotional and physical terrain newly devastated by hurricane. But oh, what gorgeous life and sass teems in these poems! Whether she writes of the exquisite delight of eating "a foam of jeweled fruits" or the horrors of "...unzipped bodies, emptied and stacked by size," Pelegrin's writing is simply incandescent.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Our Lady of the Flood sets before its altars all the rapturous junk and glorious miscellany of a world both rooted in tradition and constantly in flux. Alison Pelegrin dazzles us, once again, with a richness of experience that makes us hunger "for fig cookies, glossy loaves of bread, and for ambrosia, / confection snubbed by food snobs / as a poor folks food," and introduces us to Our Lady of the Flood herself, asking, "Lady, is that you, with a citronella halo, / ghosting the mud-milk waters / with a laundry basket of kittens in one arm?" The divine and the ordinary intersect and intertwine throughout this collection, while a steady, spirited voice shows us "a tangle of bridges," or "the ghost of wind lurching through kudzu leaves," and "the movement of a horse minus the horse itself." Readers, prepare to be astonished and transformed. Alison Pelegrin's Our Lady of the Flood is the answer to our prayers.
Mary Biddinger