Return to Bayou Lacombe by Jan Villarrubia
Debut poetry collection from Louisianan playwright Jan Villarrubia
In this debut poetry collection Louisiana poet and playwright takes us on a journey through lives and places. Direct, lyrical, sharply observed.
Praise for Return to Bayou Lacombe
This is a book of faith; each poem is a prayer hummed in images that startle. Villarrubia articulates the physical, the metaphysical, the supernatural with majesty, with divine insight. Hers is the work of the seer, the shower, the healer. If there is a poet who speaks from inside the soul of New Orleans, Jan Villarrubia is it.
Clare Potter
In Jan Villarrubia’s poetry, the world is always shifting, and we are always on the verge of becoming what we still hope to be, even as the “knives glint in the moonlight.” Like those knives, the poems in this collection are honed to catch what light there is in the darkness.
John Biguenet
Villarrubia offers us a natural world as threat and solace and finally as redemption through memory in these fine poems which play for high stakes in the affairs of the human heart.
Peter Cooley
Jan Villarrubia fixes a calm, meditative eye on the vivid personalities of her childhood in Southern Louisiana. The child’s life is viewed by a woman who has wandered far from Louisiana. She is a master poet, as skillful as the Chinese artist of the Red Cliff Scrolls who viewed his subject through a mist.
Lee Meitzen Grue
Jan Villarrubia is a native of New Orleans and an award-winning poet and playwright. She co-founded DramaRama, Inc., an annual theatre and performing arts festival in New Orleans, and teaches creative writing. She lost her home the day after Hurricane Katrina when the federal levees broke and has recently finished rebuilding a cottage on her property in a bird sanctuary near the lake. Return to Bayou Lacombe is her first poetry collection.