Poems for New Orleans [Paperback]

The indomitable spirit of the people of New Orleans is the focus of this powerful suite of poems by counterculture icon Ed Sanders. The book begins with a series of vivid evocations of key events and personalities in the city’s history, then brings this colorful legacy into the present with the harrowing force of Hurricane Katrina. That natural catastrophe, multiplied by human indifference, incompetence, and greed, is explored as a watershed demonstration of the sociopolitical fissures underlying modern America. At the core of the book is the saga of the Lebage family, beginning with Lemoine Lebage, who fought with Andrew Jackson’s forces in the Battle of New Orleans and then set down roots in the city. Five generations later his descendant Grace Lebage is a singer and poet struggling to restore her life after Katrina has wrecked her ancestral home. Although the enormous, still-unfinished tragedy of Katrina suffuses Poems for New Orleans, human resilience in the face of adversity is its ultimate subject. Here is a New Orleans only glimpsed by the outside world, a place whose creativity, humor, and triumphant spirit no tragedy can overcome."Ed Sanders—poet, Pentagon levitator, classics scholar, founding member of the Fugs—is a political force in Woodstock, New York."
—Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker

“No poet today writes history better than Ed Sanders. From the Duke of Orleans’ fragile grouping of houses in 1718, to wealth and heights with Mardi Gras and fun without guilt, to the storm of Katrina, the bard of our continent gives us the truth with these poems and songs.”
—Joanne Kyger, author of About Now: Collected Poems

“Sanders the poet-maestro of American history excels his own lyrical genius with the truth beams he sends flashing in &