Fleur de Lis

by Jennifer Reeser

This book - the author's fifth collection - contains new translations of Charles Baudelaire, poems of Paris, verses for the victims at Charlie Hebdo, poems of New Orleans, and more. These poems have appeared in journals such as the Paris digital revue, "Levure Litteraire," in Europe's leading literary e-zine, "Recours au Poeme," in American academic journals such as "Able Muse" and "THINK," in mass publications such as "The Writer," "The National Review," and others. With a foreword by French scholar and Baudelaire authority, Kathryn Oliver Mills. “The breath of Paris pushes at my shutters,” writes Jennifer Reeser, twenty-first-century flâneuse and elegant, rhyming translator of the great 19th-century French poet, Charles Baudelaire. Fleur-de-Lis is an example of how deeply a European city and that city’s poet can enter an American writer’s heart. Though Jennifer Reeser is no innocent abroad and hardly “maudit”—she is deeply Christian—the ghost of the nineteenth century haunts the cadences of this immensely talented, stylish, New-Orleans-based formalist whose work confronts “the malformations of her soul” (Fleur-de-Lis / Fleurs du Mal): I have seen queens’ swans, moved a man to cry, heard Bach played in the Metro on guitars. I have made love in Paris. Let me die. All of the nineteenth century is here, but filtered through a sophisticated, twenty-first-century sensibility, constantly moving between what was and what is. The journey is fascinating, rich, knowing, and endlessly circumfluent. Though Reeser is “besotted” with Jesus, she dives deeply into darkness as well, and boundaries (herself / Baudelaire, New Orleans / Paris) fade. She is—as Baudelaire said of his flâneur —“a mirror as vast as the crowd itself…a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness” ("The Painter of Modern Life"). -- Jack Foley

92 pages, Paperback

Published August 8, 2016

About the author

Jennifer Reeser is the author of six collections of poetry. Her first, An Alabaster Flask, was the winner of the Word Press First Book Prize. X. J. Kennedy wrote that her debut “ought to have been a candidate for a Pulitzer.” Her third, Sonnets from the Dark Lady and Other Poems, was a finalist for the Donald Justice Prize. Her fourth, The Lalaurie Horror,debuted as an Amazon bestseller in the category of Epic Poetry.
  Reeser’s poems, reviews, and translations of Russian, French, along with the Cherokee and various Native American Indian languages, have appeared in POETRY, Rattle,the Hudson Review, Recours au Poème, LIGHT Quarterly, the Formalist,the Dark Horse, SALT, Able Muse, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been anthologized in Random House London’s Everyman’s Library Series, in Longman’s Introduction to Poetry, in the Hudson Review’s historic Poets Translate Poets, and in others.
  A biracial writer of Anglo-Celtic and Native American Indian ancestry, Reeser was born in Louisiana. She studied English at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and also in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her former home.
  Reeser is the former assistant editor of Iambs & Trochees, as well as a former moderator, manuscript consultant, and mentor with the West Chester Poetry Conference.
Reeser’s translations of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova are approved by Akhmatova’s living heir, and authorized by her agents in Moscow.
  Reeser received her first writing award from the Pulitzer Prize winner, Robert Olen Butler, while in high school. She has received the Poets Respond Prize from Rattle, the Innovative Form Award from the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets, as well as the Lyric Memorial Prize and the New England Prize. Reeser’s work has been nominated seven times for the Pushcart Prize, and numerous times for the Best of the Net anthology; and her work has been set to music by the classical/art song composer, Lori Laitman, for her tribute to writer Edna St. Vincent Millay. Reeser’s poems have been translated into Urdu, Hindi, Persian, and Czech.