Scarred by nuclear smokestacks, oil wells, and surging floodwaters, and haunted by the legacies of slavery, racism, and French rule, the Louisiana of Landscape with Bloodfeud is disenchanted, but still exerts an undeniable pull. Reckoning with displacement, ancestral guilt, and centuries of human and environmental exploitation, Wendy Barnes dissects the state’s turbulent past—as a microcosm of colonial oppression, westward expansion, and the birth of global capitalism. Set at a remove, our Louisiana-born, expat speaker explores her fraught relationship with her home culture and her white working-class roots, raising questions about complicity and shame, as history “bleeds us all for its tax, some for more, / digging down into every wet wound, / digging down among the taproots, under old folks’ / marble tombs or unmarked graves.”
Reviews
“In Landscape with Bloodfeud there are at least two ways to go. There is a path to some kind of justice. and there is a path that leads to the end of mercy. Barnes’s poetry admits homesickness driven by shame, guilt, love, and most of all, a search for some kind of truth to be found in the place the speaker damns and praises, loves and left. In tortuously rich poems, this book records a private coming to terms. ‘But surely I exaggerate this shame / just to give myself a pass— / do I think I’m virtuous because I claim / these past misdeeds?’”
— Dara Wier, author of You Good Thing
“There is an eloquent and brave kind of cartography here. These poems have in them a burgeoning, a flood of language, image, culture, and a stark interrogation of the American self that make them essential. ‘Welcome / to the parish of fenced-in/vernacular.’ Landscape with Bloodfeud is an exquisitely crafted and mesmerizing debut collection.”
— Sean Nevin, author Oblivio Gate
“Landscape with Bloodfeud is remarkable for its paradoxical strengths: its descriptive power and delicacy, its weave of linguistic panache with rhetorical nonchalance, the sheer scale of the conception and the line-by-line finesse. Remarkable already, even before the reader takes in that the whole bloody saga takes place on a tightrope of conscience.”
— Robert Carnevale, co-translator of Apollo in the Grass: Selected Poems
