An Easy Place / to Die

An Easy Place / To Die is a poetic journey through New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The first section wakes with city, culture, and mythmaking as introductions into poetry and a life. The second section wanders through the social world, specifically the defenses and offenses of lovemaking. The third section is intensely personal and examines uncontrollable events. For the penultimate section, the lyric returns as an elixir to extinction and the book climatically concludes with a long, projective finale that emphasizes presence. These poems spring out of the "nagbu," or well of poetic history, specifically the tragedy of Gilgamesh, answer Eliot's The Wasteland, and allude to both as "beginning" and "ending" epic poems in the book's Joycean scaffolding. "Cellucci makes {words} carry several kinds of speech in the most concise and musical manner," comments Andrei Codrescu.