In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Burnside Soleil’s Berceuse Parish is one of the most ambitious poetry collections I have read in years, a book that almost magically paints a crisp and empathetic portrait of a community.
Gabrielle Bates wrote of the book:
“Berceuse Parish is an instant classic. Funny, tender, profound, and absolutely goddamn brilliant—here are poems to study and love, lines that will charm you and leave a resounding ache. Burnside Soleil has created a piece of literature that has everything I love about a great book of poems, plus many things I love about a great novel. I can’t think of the last time I encountered a poetry collection that felt, on the whole, this originally conceived and winsomely rendered.”
In his own words, here is Burnside Soleil’s Book Notes music playlist for his poetry collection Berceuse Parish:
Berceuse Parish is a community record: part myth, part elegy, part songbook, and ultimately a love letter to Louisiana. It’s a poetry book you can read as a novel, or maybe a broken novel you can read as a series of poems and other ephemera. It has a soundtrack, for sure, but no fiddles or accordions, which isn’t a swipe at Cajun music. I like fiddles and accordions! But if the book had a score, or if there were a montage scene of my writing over the course of five or six years, we would hear Mary Lattimore, Kali Malone, Julius Eastman, et al. It’s a book about Acadiana, so what’s with all the harps and organs? I’ve never lived anywhere else, but that’s my soundtrack.
Growing up in rural Acadiana, I know places and people aren’t always predictable, instead full of absurdities, contradictions, and surprises. I knew so many hunters, for instance, but I never shot anything beyond a duck in Nintendo’s Duck Hunt. I heard zydeco and swamp pop at all the festivals, but it was little country punk bands playing in the woods that awakened something in me.
Considering my book and Louisiana like this, maybe I’m not surprised I listened to Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 as I finished a draft. In the end, I wrote a book about Louisiana, but am unsure what that means. Any place is tricky and indeterminate the more you observe it. What I am sure about, though, is that Berceuse Parish would not exist without these compositions.
“Stand There” by P’tit Belliveau
Since I already mentioned strange classical and experimental music, let me start with this one, a fixture in my home. Each of my kids knows the lyrics. Around 2021, I found P’tit Belliveau, an Acadian musician, someone with whom I share roots—though his stayed in Canada. I wanted to blend French into my manuscript, but was unsure how to avoid a stilted academic tone. My book, at that point, felt pretty boring. P’tit Belliveau’s album, Greatest Hits Vol. 1, was lively, humorous, beautiful, an adventurous reworking of folk traditions. “Stand There”—honestly, all of his songs—inspired the creation of my narrator, Gus Babineaux. I worried less about authenticity and leaned into the preposterous. Find your own weird sound. Write your own weird sentences.
“Point Fortuna” by Weeks Island
This one comes from Jonny Campos, probably most well known as a member of Lost Bayou Ramblers. But Weeks Island—which references salt domes in Louisiana—is a steel ambient project, an official description I just found on the internet. But to me this is an eerie, gorgeous album about loss. This music comes from Louisiana, but doesn’t necessarily sound like it. Campos seems so curious, his taste expansive, and this track is more than atmospheric background music. When I listened back in 2020, it encompassed me. It gave me a sense of place. It affirmed that I, too, could maybe create my own strange Louisiana art.
All Life Long by Kali Malone
I will need to cheat and include an album (or two). Folks talk about The Sacrificial Code, deservingly, but Malone’s All Life Long was my church. I didn’t know I needed hours of slow, sustained organ notes, but I really do. From its release in April ‘24 until the end of that year, I listened to little else as I revised Berceuse Parish. I don’t mean to say that All Life Long helped me focus. That’s facile. This will seem too earnest probably, but the album is spiritually and sonically rigorous. How long could I do nothing but listen? How long could I stay in one place? Just be? How long could I work on a line? How long could I tinker with a word? I won’t close with the obvious joke.
“Potato Head Blues” by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven
We all know Louis. Overexposure sometimes makes us think “overrated.” We cease to reckon with great artists who seem ubiquitous. Van Gogh? No matter how many cheap prints you hang on your wall, Starry Night can’t be diminished. Likewise, Louis Armstrong’s “Potato Head Blues” is the most sublime music. It cannot be listened to enough.
HEY WHAT by Low
If you ever want to study how to sequence an album or book, or anything, listen to HEY WHAT. Each song, full of menace and grace, brings you to the highest pitch of emotion—the droning, noisy transitions gradually opening even stranger, more unsettling places both in the album and in the listener. This was America’s best band. You can feel the productive tension in HEY WHAT, experiments in noise alongside sheer moments of beauty. That’s not a tension to be resolved. I learned so much from HEY WHAT, but especially that. I learned I could make a book that’s part comic opera and part elegiac poetry, and that tension should be intensified. In the end, I realized that to write a book about Louisiana I had to include so much that isn’t typically Louisiana. And that is the real place I live and write from.
Burnside Soleil grew up in a houseboat on the bayou, but these days is a pilgrim in New Orleans. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere.