Poems About Terrytown, Louisiana

The Post-War Suburb Behind the Levee

Terrytown is an unincorporated community in Jefferson Parish — the West Bank of the Mississippi River, just east of Gretna and west of Algiers. It grew after World War II the way the American suburb grew everywhere: cookie-cutter ranch houses on flat streets, strip malls along the Westbank Expressway, a hardware store and a drugstore and a Catholic church on every other corner. The Oakwood Center mall was the anchor, the commercial heart, the place teenagers went and families shopped until Katrina took its roof off in 2005. It came back, but diminished — the way everything on the West Bank came back, smaller and quieter than before.

Bayou Villars threads through the community, quiet and brown, the kind of bayou that suburban streets forget is there until the water rises. And then there is the Vietnamese community — families who arrived after 1975, the departure from Saigon written into their history, who built something real here: restaurants, grocery stores, fishmongers with live crabs in tanks, a whole second economy layered beneath the ranch-house suburb. Mitchell Parfait is from Dulac, Louisiana — one estuary south, Bayou Grand Caillou, Terrebonne Parish, the Gulf. He knows the flat land behind the flood wall. He knows what a levee means.

Life in Terrytown

Sunday mornings, the Catholic church parking lots fill up by eight and clear out by ten-thirty — the same rhythm every West Bank parish town has kept for a hundred years. The Vietnamese grocery on the corner stays open straight through; the fishmonger has live blue crabs in a tank and white shrimp on ice and an old man behind the counter who will tell you exactly how to cook what you are buying. The Belle Chasse Highway runs south from here toward the Plaquemines Parish line, the oil refineries, the shipyards where the offshore workers catch their crew boats and disappear for two weeks at a time before coming home to the ranch houses on the flat streets.

La banlieue — the suburb — is not what you think of when you think of Louisiana. No Spanish moss, no Creole shotgun houses, no pirogue in the yard. Just flat streets and chain-link fences and the levee at the end of the block, grass-covered and enormous, hiding the Mississippi from view entirely. Katrina hit the West Bank in 2005: less flooding than Orleans Parish, but real enough — wind damage, roof damage, the Oakwood Center exposed to the sky, the neighborhood streets full of debris for weeks. The working families came back. They always do.

Featured Poem: Ranch House

Mitchell Parfait drives through Terrytown on the Westbank Expressway before the sun is fully up. The orange sodium lights are still on, giving way slowly to real light. He turns off the expressway onto the flat streets, moves through the quiet of the West Bank before the suburb wakes. He is from Dulac — this is not his landscape, these ranch houses and chain-link fences and strip malls — but the river is the same river, and the levee at the end of every block is the same levee logic he grew up with, the same bargain: we build high enough to hold it, and the river agrees, for now.

The poem closes not in elegy but in plain statement: the levee holds the river back — but it doesn't hold back the smell of it, or the pull. That is the Terrytown truth and the West Bank truth and the Louisiana truth. You can build a suburb on top of the delta and call the streets after the developers who platted them. But the river is still there, one block over, pulling south toward the Gulf the way it always has. DULAC POETRY holds that knowledge — the flat streets and the ranch houses and the levee at the end of the block, written by a man who grew up with that same river running through a different kind of place.

Terrytown in Louisiana Letters

The suburban West Bank is the most underwritten geography in Louisiana literature. The French Quarter gets the novels, the Garden District gets the memoirs, the bayou country gets the nature writing — and the flat streets of Terrytown, the ranch houses behind the levee, the Vietnamese fishmonger who has been setting up crates since before the sun, get nothing. Mitchell Parfait writes from the margins of the margins: not the picturesque bayou, not the romantic river city, but the working-class suburb where real Louisiana lives between shifts. The Gulf Coast working-class tradition that runs through Jesmyn Ward's fiction and the labor poetry of the oilfield — that tradition belongs here too, in Terrytown, behind the levee, where the river pulls at everything and nobody writes it down. Until now.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

Order the Paperback →Get the Kindle ($3.99) →

Read Dulac Poetry

DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait is available on Amazon in paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99). Written from Dulac, Louisiana — Terrebonne Parish, Bayou Grand Caillou, the Gulf South waterways where a man learns the river from childhood and never stops reading it. The West Bank suburb, the levee at the end of every block, the ranch houses and the fishmonger and the smell of the Mississippi twelve blocks away — all of it held in the same working-water knowledge that runs through every poem in this book. The book is on Amazon now.

Poems from the Gulf Coast, the bayou, and the water's edge. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.

If you are looking for poems about Terrytown Louisiana — or for Gulf South poetry about the West Bank of Jefferson Parish, the Vietnamese community, the levee, and the flat streets behind the flood wall — this is where that work lives. DULAC POETRY is available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon: amazon.com/dp/B0FXVZDLZG. Written from inside the working-water world, by a poet from Dulac, Louisiana — one estuary south, the same river, the same levee logic.

Read alongside poems about Gretna, Louisiana and poems about Harvey, Louisiana to follow the West Bank corridor across Jefferson Parish. Then read about DULAC POETRY on the book page, or learn about Mitchell Parfait on the author page.

DULAC POETRY — Terrytown Louisiana poetry on Amazon. Get Your Copy on Amazon | Buy the Book | Read Dulac Poetry on Kindle