State Street by Katie Bowler

Description

“State Street is a remarkable act of salvage. Katie Bowler’s driven, encompassing narrative careens with dark humor, anger, grief, and grit through the surreal Katrina landscape. She’s both in its midst—a human eye of the storm—and at ‘a great distance,’ seeing with compassion and shrewd clarity. The reader senses Bowler’s faith in her course throughout—that out of the chaos and detritus and loss, bolstered by the conjured presences of friends and family, she can make meaning. Art is what’s rescued; art becomes the rescuer. Bowler’s ‘small survival’ is an impressive achievement.” —Debra Allbery

“A house with a tricycle perched on its roof. A man whose life’s work lies stuffed into garbage bags. ‘In the middle of this little hell,’ Katie Bowler tells us, ‘I find a photo of a banjo.’ These are the rare, unbroken things suddenly turned to relics, haunting proof that New Orleans remains a living city. State Street is a poem of beautiful rage and sorrow; it is also in its very making a poem of defiant hope.” —Maurice Manning

More press for State Street:

“The tone is jazzy, no straightforward, sing-along melody here, but riffs, fragments and tonalities. The poem makes demands of the reader and depends upon you to make connections. This approach was a risk worth taking, and I think it works.” — Greensboro News & Record

Katie Bowler Young

Katie Bowler was born and raised near New Orleans, La. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, she returned to the city to salvage photographs, art, and pieces of New Orleans’ cultural history. In State Street, she explores loss of home and homeland, experiences the panic and awe of the familiar becoming unfamiliar, and finds among the wreckage humanity, humor, and hope.