New Barrier Islands

Description

Ann Plicque

New Barrier Islands

ISBN: 978-1-956921-59-5 (pbk.)

(January 1, 2026) 

From the Foreword by the author:

Barrier islands are what protect coastlines from erosion, and are essential to maintain fisheries, as well as land.  If they don’t exist, storms and wave action eat away the land.

On the other hand, they stop flotsam and jetsam from drifting ashore.

It’s the eternal double-edged sword:  What do we let in or keep out?

I hope these poems show you worlds you might not visit otherwise, and they erode the separation we feel from people and places unlike ourselves and our own.

These poems are explorations of nature, family, love and their intersections.

New Barrier Islands is about lives lived near and along the shores of South Louisiana and the land, water and humans there.  These people and this place are parochial, yet universal, and remind us we are united on this blue marble, that, as the philosopher Gottfried Leibnitz said, “…is the best of all possible worlds.” 

Praise for Ann Plicque and New Barrier Islands

I lean into the job
that works the confines
of my narrow heart,

writes poet Ann Plicque in her fine collection, New Barrier Islands. She works the confines with image-rich, dense language, works them ever outward until there are no confines, but a whole world of the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, of Cajun musicians and hunting ducks where she sees

The clown-faced wood duck
tiny, beautiful, shy—
a marsh Vermeer.

Her eye and ear are alive and well—but to work the confines of the heart she explores child abuse and the reality of being a young mother. She brings the same careful attention in these narrative poems of her inner life as she does to the wide world.  She has brought us fully into her heart, and we are the better for it.

—Rodger Kamenetz, author of Seeing into the Life of Things.

Sing with the swinging scythes, the “La-La” music/ of the squeezebox, the ronds de jambe; even bullets “sing” and crackle the air.  Sing with the sonic richness of these lyrics; they will call and respond to every sense in your body.

—Kay Murphy, author of Belief Blues

In precise and imaginatively crafted poems, Ann Plicque explores geographies both external and internal. New Barrier Islands evokes place—southern, tidal, natural, and historical—moving seamlessly between worlds as rich and personal as “collards or spinach with ham hocks, garlic, sweet-potatoes” to Civil Rights struggles and the Jim Crow era.  The language, like the Mississippi River it evokes, presses “past heavy bridge pilasters to the Gulf, swift, mysterious, [and] stirs muddy depths.”

—Doug Ramspeck, author of Smoke Memories.