Landscape shapes this collection of essays by the New Orleans–born and bred poet St. Germain (The Journals of Scheherazade). While her family has all the earmarks of a troubled one—"drugs, alcoholism, sex, murder, suicide"—their tale is merely the frame within which St. Germain has constructed a memoir of and dirge for a place: Louisiana. St. Germain brings these essays together with little disjunction and few repetitions. In her telling, family data are often blurry and family versions of events can differ (e.g., why and how Grandfather shot his eye out). Place, however, is unmistakable and tangible. St. Germain's passionate commitment to place is the lens through which she conveys the specialness of growing up in the Louisiana swampland, where Christmas celebrations, amusement parks, meals and even fishing are as ordained by the landscape as hurricanes, which can wreak "almost one and a half billion dollars worth of damage," and Mardi Gras, that time when the uptown streets become so clogged St. Germain sits on her friend's shoulders, "lifted high and parentless above the swaggering crowds." St. Germain succeeds in simultaneously offering a sensitive memoir and an homage to Louisiana's swamps, the people who dwell near them and New Orleans. (Mar.)
