Rapunzel's Braid
In Rapunzel’s Braid, Beau Boudreaux’s second book of poems, the poetry transports the reader through lyric couplets and metaphors that explore beauty. The poems peer into a diversity of cityscapes, most notably New Orleans—Audubon Park, soft shelled crabs, jazz and angels. The poems reveal a landscape of flowers and dwell in relationships, they travel the roads of courting into love, and the world of fatherhood.
Boudreaux has a dazzling capacity for sudden imagistic insights: “like plucking a camellia from a neighbor’s tree”, “turned paradise by twilight”, “a sultan with a taped wood fungo bat”, “a shot of bourbon/hush of evening.” These poems follow somehow in the sidestroke of the wild poet Stevie Smith (“Not Waving but Drowning”), yet are also soothed and “entertained by angels” -- a path opened by a quoted scriptural passage. Gold New Orleans jazz lifts as high as friends “high on a suspension bridge” and accompanies earthy celebrations, “like pulling gold bracelets/from their well” about a meal of softshell crabs. A book of flowers, blue gardenia and blossoming magnolia, a book of newborn bliss and compassion – this book is a bright braid to bring beauty down from its lonely tower.
- Carol Muske-Dukes
In Rapunzel’s Braid, Beau Boudreaux takes us through the thunder afternoons of southern desire all the way to the mornings of fatherhood. The lens is devotion to love and sensory detail, “I can’t determine beauty // strands everywhere—,” and the place is always New Orleans, even when we hear echoes of time in other locales. There’s a formal delicacy in the couplet, the main device for these poems as they balance encounter with response. The poems go from fishing to champagne, from baseball to friendship, from love letters to the delight of a newborn son, always tendering us “more chalk / for the experience.” Boudreaux can make us feel relation and taste reflection’s mood. What a pleasure of a book!
- Lisa Samuels
Boudreaux has a dazzling capacity for sudden imagistic insights: “like plucking a camellia from a neighbor’s tree”, “turned paradise by twilight”, “a sultan with a taped wood fungo bat”, “a shot of bourbon/hush of evening.” These poems follow somehow in the sidestroke of the wild poet Stevie Smith (“Not Waving but Drowning”), yet are also soothed and “entertained by angels” -- a path opened by a quoted scriptural passage. Gold New Orleans jazz lifts as high as friends “high on a suspension bridge” and accompanies earthy celebrations, “like pulling gold bracelets/from their well” about a meal of softshell crabs. A book of flowers, blue gardenia and blossoming magnolia, a book of newborn bliss and compassion – this book is a bright braid to bring beauty down from its lonely tower.
- Carol Muske-Dukes
In Rapunzel’s Braid, Beau Boudreaux takes us through the thunder afternoons of southern desire all the way to the mornings of fatherhood. The lens is devotion to love and sensory detail, “I can’t determine beauty // strands everywhere—,” and the place is always New Orleans, even when we hear echoes of time in other locales. There’s a formal delicacy in the couplet, the main device for these poems as they balance encounter with response. The poems go from fishing to champagne, from baseball to friendship, from love letters to the delight of a newborn son, always tendering us “more chalk / for the experience.” Boudreaux can make us feel relation and taste reflection’s mood. What a pleasure of a book!
- Lisa Samuels
Running Red, Running Redder
The sly humor and hard edges of Beau Boudreaux's Running Red, Running Redder win the reader over with endless surprises.
"A fiery color scheme sparks through these tightly wound poems of desire, luminosity, loneliness, weather and place. Written in multiregisters of language, allusion, and imagery, they move effortlessly between high and popular culture. Filled with sonic pleasures and insights, the poems surprise and awaken with the sting of their 'wasp of words.'"--Susan Firer
"I love the exquisite lyric poise and quiet elegance in Beau Boudreaux's powerful new collection. These subtle and wry poems are filled with sly tonal shifts that reflect the quotidian strangeness of our daily lives. Often, these poems ripple with the desires that move tidally through human encounters, and Beau Boudreaux is both the precise chronicler and wise rider of these delicious waves."-- David St. John
"A fiery color scheme sparks through these tightly wound poems of desire, luminosity, loneliness, weather and place. Written in multiregisters of language, allusion, and imagery, they move effortlessly between high and popular culture. Filled with sonic pleasures and insights, the poems surprise and awaken with the sting of their 'wasp of words.'"--Susan Firer
"I love the exquisite lyric poise and quiet elegance in Beau Boudreaux's powerful new collection. These subtle and wry poems are filled with sly tonal shifts that reflect the quotidian strangeness of our daily lives. Often, these poems ripple with the desires that move tidally through human encounters, and Beau Boudreaux is both the precise chronicler and wise rider of these delicious waves."-- David St. John
Significant Other
Beau Boudreaux’s poems in Significant Other search through landscape and myth for a love that is both tangible and portable. In the longest poem in the collection “Hades to Persephone,” Boudreaux nestles Greek myth in an airport hotel room. Here Hades experiences his wife’s departure “Like all/Paired sleepers returning to the world/In the pitch and thrall of where they’ve been.” The often somber and wistful mood of the poems is aptly accompanied by a playful style of surprising similes and experiments with line breaks and white space. The poem “Four Queens” is able to contain the weight of the lines
…there is a point
where individuals fail
each other without intent
like a sky void of stars…
in a vertical Venn diagram of the sane and insane, single and the significant other. Boudreaux’s poems are working through loves that are difficult toward one worth the taste of “bittersweet/green peel as Rilke stated “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult our tasks…for which all other work is but preparation." -Michele Reese
…there is a point
where individuals fail
each other without intent
like a sky void of stars…
in a vertical Venn diagram of the sane and insane, single and the significant other. Boudreaux’s poems are working through loves that are difficult toward one worth the taste of “bittersweet/green peel as Rilke stated “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult our tasks…for which all other work is but preparation." -Michele Reese
Publications and Prizes
Books: Running Red, Running Redder (Wordtech Communications, 2012)
Chapbooks: Significant Other (New Dawn Unlimited, 2006)
Anthologies: The Southern Poetry Anthology (Texas Review Press, 2011)
Journals: Antioch Review, Cream City Review, Louisiana Literature, Margie
Books: Running Red, Running Redder (Wordtech Communications, 2012)
Chapbooks: Significant Other (New Dawn Unlimited, 2006)
Anthologies: The Southern Poetry Anthology (Texas Review Press, 2011)
Journals: Antioch Review, Cream City Review, Louisiana Literature, Margie
