The Dirty Side of the Storm
W.W. Norton & Co., 2007

"At once a love song and a dirge to a landscape being swallowed by the waters that define it."—St. Petersburg Times An evocative meditation on destruction and creation, the sacred and ephemeral, along Louisiana's coast. In poems that bear witness to the eroding bayou country and its Cajun culture, Martha Serpas venerates a vanishing landscape defined by water—sensuous, fecund, and destructive. As marsh turns into gulf, identity and consciousness are transformed as well. Serpas's verses invest paradox with her own defiantly spiritual meaning.

Cote Blanche
New Issues Poetry Press, 2002

In his foreword, Harold Bloom describes Serpas as "in a highly original way, a Catholic devotional poet from Louisiana [who has] perfected, this, her first book, across fifteen years," and finds that "a double handful of these [40 plus] poems may achieve permanence." Serpas is from Galliano, La., and teaches at the University of Tampa; her speaker is unflinching in looking into the contemporary quandaries facing her faith: "She walks to the clinic herself, the heel of her palm pressed to her stomach. Later, she repeats the word, fetus, a chant, a vein, another part that cannot be saved." --Publisher's Weekly

"...[A] book of love and death in a Louisiana landscape is as savory and abundant as the rhythms she employs." -- Molly Peacock

"Many rereadings persuade me that a double handful of these poems may achieve permanence." -- From the foreword by Harold Bloom

"This is how George Eliot, if she had written poems as compassionate as her fiction, might have proceeded." -- Richard Howard