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Black Sheep Boy (Rare Bird Books)

Meet a wild-hearted boy from the bayou land of Louisiana. Misfit, outcast, loner. Call him anything but a victim. Sissy, fairy, Jenny Woman. Son of a mixed-race Holy Ghost mother and a Cajun French phantom father.

In a series of tender and tough stories, he encounters gender outlaws, drag queen renegades, and a rogues gallery of sex-starved priests, perverted teachers, and murderous bar owners. To escape his haunted history, the wild-hearted boy must shed his old skin and make a new self. As he does, his story rises from dark and murk, from moss and mud, to reach a new light and a new brand of fairy tale. Cajun legends, queer fantasies, and universal myths converge into a powerful work of counter-realism. Black Sheep Boy is a song of passion and a novel of defiance.

Praise for Black Sheep Boy

“Beautifully impressionistic, and also raw, open and vulnerable. Pousson’s bayou is such a frightening and vibrant place, generous and punishing, and the narrator’s perspective pulls us in, and brings the reader close.”—Aimee Bender, author of The Color Master and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

"Electrical, convulsive, hallucinatory, elemental... A book to give you fevers, chills, and visions."—Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day

Praise for No Place, Louisiana

finalist for the John Gardner Book Award in Fiction

“Setting out to capture the modern South, the first-time novelist confidently eschews the style of a Faulkner or the charm of a McCullers to evoke the prejudices and limitations of Cajun culture in its unique, enriching and destructive complexity.”—Publishers Weekly

“No Place, Louisiana is the Southern answer to The Ice Storm; from its sultry pages there emerges a chilling portrait of a family in the midst of a very deep freeze.”—The Los Angeles Times

“Powerful and empathetic...A beautiful ode to the lonely and unloved.”—New Orleans Times-Picayune 

“Pousson has written a strong, confident novel... many veteran authors have yet to write a novel of this depth.”—BookReporter.com

“A remarkably sure-footed and rich first novel, admirable not only for the clarity of its voice and the fluidity of its style but for the coherence of its vision; its dramatic family saga, gradually unfolding in a deftly integrated Cajun universe, reveals the narrator to be a complex and acrobatic survivor. Pousson brings remarkable insight and literary power to the landscape of the American novel.” —Lis Harris, author of Rules of Engagement

Praise for Sugar

finalist for the 2006 Lambda Literary Awards for Poetry

“With Sugar, Martin Pousson returns to the territory that activated his novel, No Place, Louisiana, recharging that fertile ground with a shift from prose to poetry. The result is a series of compressed observations, by turns satiric and heartbreaking, languorous, outraged, and tender.” —Dave King, author of The Ha-Ha

“Here is the poet Louisiana has always wanted. Gulf Coast heat turns into huge trees and lush flora, which then turn into sex and dramatic dialogue. Desire so metamorphic inevitably slides toward hallucination. To convey experience at the edge, Martin Pousson has invented a new poetics that takes from the earlier art only its intense imagery and verbal economy. The few dozen pages of Sugar bring a tragic and sensuous bayou mindscape unforgettably to life.” —Alfred Corn, author of Stake and Contradictions

“...his sugar ain’t sweet, it’s scorched.” —Jake Shears, Scissor Sisters

Martin Pousson was born and raised in the bayou land of Louisiana. His short stories won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and have appeared in The Antioch Review, Epoch, Five Points, StoryQuarterly, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He also was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award, the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. He now lives in Los Angeles.