76 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations
Poetry / American-General | Poetry / Places | Poetry / Women Authors
Whether by way of visitations from secular saints, hauntings from childhood, or back talk from “indelicate broads,” a complicated world speaks to and through Alison Pelegrin in Our Lady of Bewilderment. An unusual blend of mystic-comedian, Pelegrin explores physical and psychic beauty and terror without losing sight of wonder. Drawing on the aid of beings real and imaginary, Our Lady of Bewilderment offers humorous, honest, and intimate poems contemplating life’s traumas and joys, filtered through the religion-infused secular traditions of Louisiana.
Alison Pelegrin is the author of four poetry collections, including Waterlines. She has received a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts as well as an ATLAS grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents. She is writer-in-residence at Southeastern Louisiana University.
“In Our Lady of Bewilderment, Alison Pelegrin is ‘faithful to calamity,’ as she writes in ‘Doomsday’s Daughter.’ In clear-eyed, gutting, and sometimes sharply funny poems, Pelegrin explores seismic shifts and disasters both ecological and personal, reckoning with adolescence, climate change, floodwaters, the trials of adulthood, and the complex landscape of home. ‘I give off a riot-ready vibe,’ writes Pelegrin in ‘Myth of Myself,’ ‘but if you come close // my soft heart shows.’ I love this book's capaciousness: its steeliness and generosity, its heartbreak and truth. Our Lady of Bewilderment is a hurricane of a book.”
—Catherine Pierce, Mississippi Poet Laureate and author of Danger Days
“Mother Mary on a half shell. A waterline ringing a house. The Cajun Navy riding boats through flooded streets. Patron saints, shrines, and casinos. In her stunning new collection Our Lady of Bewilderment, Alison Pelegrin offers swerves at every turn and as she tracks the landscape of New Orleans and southern Louisiana. An exploration of both girlhood and motherhood—and life in a female body—these poems weave family histories with the collective histories of the Gulf South. In the title poem, the speaker names ‘Our Lady of Bewilderment’ as her ‘alter ego,’ and indeed ‘bewilderment,’ with its associations of disorientation and mystery and surprise, is at the heart of this collection. Pelegrin’s voice is vivid and defiant, and her use of form absolutely masterful. This is an astonishing book.”
—Nicole Cooley, author of Of Marriage and Girl after Girl after Girl
“I have long been Alison Pelegrin’s biggest fan for the little mean streak (delicious as Dorothy Parker’s or Plath’s) that never got socialized out of her, for the way she gets the untouristy side and unromantic details of Louisiana exactly right, for her ability to make me laugh and break my heart in the same poem. But this is her best book yet. In it, she tackles the complexities of ‘motherhood’s ogre love’: her own fraught relationship with a mother who ‘handled things differently, with a baseball bat,’ and her fierce love for sons who are ‘gimme gimme ingrates, heartbreakers, tearing at me with relish.’ Presiding over it all are the bathtub madonnas of south Louisiana lawns and a cast of ad hoc Marys to suit every mood and need, from Our Lady of the Hot Flash to the titular Our Lady of Bewilderment. Hail Alison Pelegrin, whose poems are my kind of prayers.”
—Julie Kane, former Louisiana Poet Laureate and the author of Mothers of Ireland
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