By the time of the post-Katrina entries, the hangover has turned to heartbreak: “this blues now is just too big.” Post-disaster, he turns from imagistic prose to poetry, his verse more direct, often angrier than his essays, ripe with “dead pets rotting away behind locked doors.” Even when he swings back to prose, he remains on point, foreseeing a diaspora, a vision of a city gone but a nation enriched. “Your food will get better,” he prophesies. “You will be renewed by the intelligence of a whole culture.” The dream, dispersed.
Why New Orleans Matters | by Tom Piazza | Regan/HarperCollins | 192 pp | $14.95
New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City | by Andrei Codrescu | Algonquin | 288 pp | $14
___
On the Web:
Tom Piazza: http://www.tompiazza.com/
Andrei Codrescu: http://www.codrescu.com/
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