Louis E. Bourgeois teaches literature and writing at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Olga is his first book publication.

About Olga:

"What I love about Louis E. Bourgeois is the hard bone of narrative in each work. No forced pieties of most poets of the day. Bourgeois is in almost every poem haunting. Superb!"
—Barry Hannah

"The poetic writings of Louis E. Bourgeois offer an exacting appreciation of personal tragedy, and of an infinitely larger world that embraces ‘the indifference of life to all things.’ With unwavering self-awareness, the poet defies universal authority, and challenges the reader’s perceptions of passing events. His work is void of spurious hope, yet taunts us with a lingering sense of individual purpose."
—Laura Qa

"The work of Louis E. Bourgeois combines the haunting redemption of Georg Trakl and the bitter beauty of Charles Wright into a necessary 21st century yawp. His poems are like small bombs that reverberate in the mind, and he also writes some of the best prose poems of any poet of his generation. His work never ceases to surprise and reveal. Olga is a much needed work, a first book that you’ll return to again and again."
—J.E. Pitts

"The astonishing poems of Louis E. Bourgeois’s first book, Olga, pass by in the silence of death or dream. In ‘Homage to Georg Trakl’ and “Homage to Søren Kierkegaard,’ he writes of ‘absolute negation/absolutely defined,’ of ‘nothingness/and dawn mist,’ in which all things lie ‘beyond the horizon/where winter always is.’ This is his territory, too—one which few have the courage to descend into, one where ‘They plan / executions better than they prepare for all who enter and stay/ lonely forever.’ His poems are dark, yes, but iridescent with the precise, haunting imagery of his Cajun landscape: a rich, rotting world where creosote fills the air, armadillo bones serve as toys for children who play beside a ditch, and a gar struggles on the shore of Lake Ponchartrain, its eyes full of fire, wearing ‘a suit of armor that only we could see.’"
—Ann Fisher-Wirth