Swamp Songs
The Making of an Unruly Woman

Sheryl St. Germain

219 pp., 6 x 9
ISBN 978-087480-743-1
Memoir

A Memoir from the Louisiana Delta

Food, and particularly local cuisine is so important to Creoles that it’s said as soon as they enter Heaven they wave hello to Saint Peter and ask, ‘Comment ca va, Monsieur? Where’s the pot of jambalaya?’ If Saint Peter says there’s no jambalaya they will rub their chins and inquire about the food customs in the other place. Many New Orleanians would, in fact, claim they’d rather be in hell than eat bad food. Indeed, what better way to understand South Louisiana than as a kind of Dantean underworld where we fill ourselves to bursting with those very vices that tortured us when we lived above ground: food and drink.

Feeding off the otherworldly mythos of New Orleans and the surrounding southern swampland, St. Germain stirs up the past—both her own and Louisiana’s—to create Swamp Songs, an evocative, elegiac collection of essays that bursts with pain and redemption. From the shores of Lake Pontchartrain to the streets of New Orleans during Mardi Gras these compelling essays taste of loss: the loss of wild open places papered over with fast food restaurants and retail stores, the loss of father and brother to the embrace of addiction, the loss of self through risk and rebellion. And yet the leaven of hope works throughout to raise the possibility of salvation found speaking the truth.

The undeniable force of Swamp Songs is St. Germain’s rare ability to make the ugly compelling, the painful beautiful, the difficult enlightening. She has blended together word after word to create a zesty, complex jambalaya thick with all the ingredients that make life rich and resonant.

“These powerful essays remind us that to be fully human we should endeavor not to glide smoothly over the surface of life but to seek out, like Thoreau, the thickest and most dismal swamp. They are vitally metaphorical, linking spirit and body, body and landscape, landscape and spirit, in ways that surprise us on every page.”
—Robert Hellenga, author of Blues Lessons

“Swamp Songs offers a sense of life on the Louisiana Delta more vivid than any book I have ever read. Like a magnificent roux its pages are rich, redolent with the complexity and contradictions of this extraordinary place. Her astonishing imaginative leaps and musings, her attention to detail and lyric presentation, place St. Germain in a class shared by masterful memorists—and celebrated Cajun musicians and chefs—alike.”
—Kim Barnes, author of Hungry for the World

“As for ranking this book among others of its kind, I’ll say this—there aren’t any quite like this one, and that’s why it’s fascinating.”
—Peggy Shumaker, author of Underground Rivers

Sheryl St. Germain is associate professor of English at Iowa State University. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry including the most recent "The Journals of Scheherazade" as well as being the 1999 winner of the William Faulkner Creative Writing Award for the Personal Essay. She lives in Ames, Iowa.