Our Lady of Bewilderment
LSU Press 2022
Whether by way of visitations from secular saints, hauntings from childhood, or back talk from “indelicate broads,” a complicated world speaks to and through Alison Pelegrin in Our Lady of Bewilderment. An unusual blend of mystic-comedian, Pelegrin explores physical and psychic beauty and terror without losing sight of wonder. Drawing on the aid of beings real and imaginary, Our Lady of Bewilderment offers humorous, honest, and intimate poems contemplating life’s traumas and joys, filtered through the religion-infused secular traditions of Louisiana.
Waterlines
LSU Press 2016
In Waterlines, Louisiana native Alison Pelegrin gives us poems that describe the terrible power of nature even as they underscore the state’s beauty. The poet moves from the familiar gaudy delights of life in New Orleans to immerse the reader in the vastly different experience of living north of Lake Pontchartrain. In this fractured world, the Bogue Falaya River becomes a highway paved with benedictions, psalms, and praise for ordinary things, as Pelegrin searches the unfamiliar for an incarnation of home.
Water—the threat of hurricanes and floods, as well as the tangled geographies and histories of the rivers and lakes themselves—sustains the poet as she settles into the casual beauty of “the daily route,” finding spiritual depth and delight in both human and natural wonders.
Hurricane Party
The University of Akron Press 2011
“Hurricane Party is an original and rewarding work, a masterful follow-up to Big Muddy River of Stars, and a livewire, compelling contribution to American poetry. No other poet sounds like Pelegrin, and that’s the sure sign of a writer at the top of her game.”—Elton Glaser
Our Lady of the Flood
Diode Editions 2018
“Our Lady of The Flood sets before its altars all the rapturous junk and glorious miscellany of a world both rooted in tradition and constantly in flux. . . . Readers prepare to be transformed.”
Mary Biddinger
Big Muddy River of Stars
Chosen by B. H. Fairchild as winner of the Akron Poetry Prize
University of Akron Press 2007
“With Li Po as her muse, and a subject matter ranging from home-wreckers, honky-tonks, and jackalopes to post-Katrina tragedy and survival, I’m afraid I’m stumped to find a fitting figure for the utterly unique voice of Alison Pelegrin. Words fail me, but certainly not Pelegrin, who writes some of the jazziest, high-velocity, and, if I may say so without causing the keepers of the gates of high culture to wet their pants, entertaining poetry I have read in a long time.”
B. H. Fairchild
Alison Pelegrin 
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