| abstract |
Wetlands Rise is a volume of poems depicting episodes in the history of Southern Louisiana, from the founding of New Orleans in 1718 to the present. The poems recount
the historical exploitation of the city's most vulnerable inhabitants and evoke the devastating consequences of human intervention on the environment. Through personae
like Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville and BP oil executives, the poems consider the machinations of power at pivotal moments in the cycles of building, destruction,
and rebuilding that define the region's history. Using colloquial language and humor, the poems examine the ways working class, poor, and enslaved inhabitants developed
unique cultural forms as means of political subversion and social transgression. This interdisciplinary project uses poems as modes of historical and cultural
investigation. It is a fragmented narrative of a colony, territory, then state that serves as a microcosm of colonial oppression, westward expansion, and the birth of
global capitalism. It is also a lyric exploration of the effects of the region's historical legacy on a contemporary speaker, a native Louisiana transplant who looks
back at the state from a distant vantage that is both figurative and literal. She pays tribute to its culture and speculates about her own culpability in its complex
past. The manuscript raises the question: To what extent are all of us who benefit from the legacies of environmental exploitation, of colonialism, of slavery,
complicit in those injustices?
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