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ALL SAINTS
By Brenda Marie Osbey
Louisiana State University Press, 128 pages, $22.95 cloth, $15.95 paper
Brenda Marie Osbey’s Afro-New Orleans ancestors and cultural forebears speak to her in these fierce, haunting poems, including her grandmother Alberta, who worked stitching men’s suits “to hang from the shoulders of white mannequins,” and Luis Congo, a free Kongo man employed in New Orleans to execute escaping slaves until he himself was killed by slaves: “i came as you came,” he tells his assassins, “crossing not one but two deathly waters.”