Swamp Songs: The Making of an Unruly Woman

Rating:
Summary: Gumbo of winning thickness & flavor.
Review: Shery St. Germain here skillfully combines melancholy and ecstasy, hard environmental science & frank emotional discovery. "Swamp Songs" amounts to creative non-fiction as *bildungsroman* -- a portrait of the artist as a Louisiana woman. In a style enriched by poetic hooks to all manner of sensory intensity, these essays detail how Germain has escaped a family addled by drugs and argument, and the many dangerous temptations of an upbringing in and around New Orleans. Yet at the same time she dramatizes her ineradicable connections to that world, even to the fragile bayou lands and their denizens, animal, vegetable, and mineral; she neglects none of the delights her moss-scarred roots have left her with. These pieces are songs indeed, full of thought to be sure but also, more powerfully, rising and keening straight out of the blood-drenched and ever-endangered swamp-stuff within our ribs.

Rating:
Summary: Gumbo of winning thickness & flavor.
Review: Shery St. Germain here skillfully combines melancholy and ecstasy, hard environmental science & frank emotional discovery. "Swamp Songs" amounts to creative non-fiction as *bildungsroman* -- a portrait of the artist as a Louisiana woman. In a style enriched by poetic hooks to all manner of sensory intensity, these essays detail how Germain has escaped a family addled by drugs and argument, and the many dangerous temptations of an upbringing in and around New Orleans. Yet at the same time she dramatizes her ineradicable connections to that world, even to the fragile bayou lands and their denizens, animal, vegetable, and mineral; she neglects none of the delights her moss-scarred roots have left her with. These pieces are songs indeed, full of thought to be sure but also, more powerfully, rising and keening straight out of the blood-drenched and ever-endangered swamp-stuff within our ribs.