Let It Be A Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems
I do not think I have ever encountered a poet less self-consciously or more powerfully female. St. Germain does not try to intellectualize or abstract her gender: neither does she try to escape from it. I am that I am, as Someone once said: she accepts herself with a fullness, with an intensity, and with a gloriously swaggering melodiousness that are, I think, new to poetry in our language. --Burton RaffelSheryl St. Germain is a courageous, wild, and disciplined poet. --Alicia OstrikerSheryl St. Germain's poetry is filled with sensual delight, with the enjoyment of good food, good company, and good music. While she travels the world, St. Germain returns again and again to her native New Orleans, to the bonds of family and the forces of nature that break through and spill over human walls and barriers. In Let it Be a Dark Roux, St. Germain teaches us how to embrace all the currents of life its pleasures, its sorrows, its inevitable challenge to step out into the street and take up the dance once more. --Mary Swander