This collection combines the vivid post-Katrina experiences captured by internet-based “bloggers” from New Orleans--individuals who don't think of themselves as writers but who were writing powerfully in the months after 8-29--with the work of  traditional writers. Some of those, like novelist Dedra Johnson and poet Robin Kemp, share their most immediate reactions from their own blogs.  The book deliberately blurs the line between formats and focuses on cataloging some of the best-written and most powerful reactions of the people who experienced Katrina.

Editors Sam Jasper and Mark Folse are writers who turned to the Internet to chronicle their own experiences and reactions to Katrina and found in the months after 8-29 they were part of a larger community sharing the public and very private events of the period.The book will be published late August, 2010. A launch party and reading is scheduled for Thursday, Aug. 26 at 8 p.m. upstairs at Mimi’s in the Marigny.

Contributors include cookbook author and travel-and-sailing writer Troy Gilbert, poet Valentine Pierce, Professor Jerry Ward of Dillard University and poet/playwright Raymond “Moose” Jackson together with the work of bloggers who are by day engineers, teachers, geologists, computer programmers, bankers, and social workers but in their spare time writers of talent whose only prior outlet has been their Internet-based blogs. These works were edited minimally for basic spelling and grammar, mistakes easily made writing first hand accounts created under great duress, in an attempt to preserve the original "howl" of people who experienced these events first hand.


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This limited edition chapbook of poems by Mark Folse launches the Gallatin and Toulouse Press Fragile Agate poetry series. In voices ranging for the whimsical to the lyric and elegiac, Folse captures the sound and sense of odd bits of life in New Orleans as only the essayist of Carry Me Home can. The initial series are hand-made and numbered on specially selected eco-friendly paper so order yours now.

"A fantastic poet,... The way he structures the  sounds and the words and the rhythms on the page is exactly who we are. He is quintessentially New Orleans."

-- Dave Brinks, founder of the 17 Poets! reading series and the School of the Imagination in New Orleans, and publisher of YAWP! and Trembling Pillow Press.

Price: $8.00, and $2.50 shipping.

Dedicated to publishing unique New Orleans voices, this Fragile Agate Chapbook launches Gallatin and Toulouse's first venture into publishing the best examples of the city's flourishing poetry scene.

Here's one poem from the book, "Gravity."

We butcher ourselves
on boudin     tasso      gumbo
jumbo shrimp fried crisp
dressed yes, extra mayo
for sure and chips, yeah,
like cholesterol was a contest
& I hear a bottle or two
of wine a day is good for you.

We just can’t help it
any more than a trombone,
you just got to let it slide
like gravity has some say about it
& gravity, gravity is my shepherd
he leadeth me to lay down
on green neutral grounds
fizzy    dizzy     & fit to pop.

Yes gravity is a character
well known to the police hereabouts
he has a regular waiter &
the lord helps him to seconds
because we’re all going down
an ankle an hour, catastrophe
softly lapping at our calves
all furry and purry like, asking:
you gonna eat that last shrimp?