NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans high school junior and four-time published author Libby Stassi has released her most personal work yet: The Picture in His Wallet, a collection of original poetry paired with the wartime memoirs of her great-grandmother, Deola Daigle. Blending historical memory with lyrical verse, the book offers a poignant glimpse into the unseen battles fought far from the front lines during World War II.
“I wanted this project to honor not just my great-grandmother,” Libby says, “but the countless women whose strength shaped history in quieter ways.”
Libby spent weeks transcribing Deola’s original writings and crafting sixteen poems inspired by her words. In one piece, Libby writes:
“When war calls, a girl must zip up her white dress—and ride home in silence. War does not wait.”
Throughout the collection, she paints vivid emotional landscapes, revealing the cost of war not only on soldiers but also on the women and families who waited, worked, dreamed, and grieved at home.
Themes of faith, resilience, and identity run deep. One poem reflects:
“Fathers who cradle their dead sons cradle the face of God. Sisters who tend to their ailing brothers tend to the wounds of God.”
Another turns waiting into its own kind of warfare:
“I count the war headlines like rosary beads—each one a prayer that your time away won’t grow longer. And in a way, waiting becomes its own kind of war.”
The book’s title, The Picture in His Wallet, captures the steadfast presence of women like Deola as silent anchors for those fighting abroad. In one poem, Libby writes:
“What becomes of the rose, when frost grips the stem that once danced in the sun?
What of the mirror, when the girl it remembered grows steel in her gaze?
Shall I remain the apple of your eye, the picture in your wallet, the rose that wakes you, and pulls you home?”
Beyond being symbols of home and hope, these women bore their own ache for peace—an ache often left unspoken. In a poem imagining Deola’s internal dialogue, Libby writes:
“Oh, to follow the hush that calls me down a dirt road that remembers my name.
To hear tires hum against gravel, and chase a pink sun stretched like memory across the sky.”
Even with a roof, a bed, and companionship, the longing for the stillness of a prewar life lingered.
“It’s hard to utter homesick when others are just plain sick,” Libby reflects.
“But I’m sick for stillness—for the ground to stop trembling, for the sky to clear its ashy throat, and let the sun fall the way it used to.”
Even in reunion, the shadow of war persisted. Libby writes of trains, claiming them as symbols of possibility that became symbols of separation. In peacetime,
“every mile forward is a promise,”
but in wartime,
“the dancer, now barefoot, rides with nothing but a suitcase and a letter she cannot bear to read.”
The collection also touches on key moments of WWII history, including the Battle of the Bulge, which Libby describes as the moment
“even winter held its breath.”
German soldiers,
“men in steel-grey livery,”
were tasked with defending a crumbling ideology:
“They raised flags for a people already lost,” she writes.
“Chanted pride for a face they no longer wore.”
The war, she suggests, was not only physical but psychological—
“language, once the vessel of thought, now the artillery of their souls.”
Even words, she notes, were weaponized, and identity fractured.
Through The Picture in His Wallet, Libby Stassi honors her family’s legacy while inviting readers to reflect on their own relationships with history, memory, and resilience.
The Picture in His Wallet is available now on Amazon.
For media inquiries, review copies, or interview requests, please contact:
Libby Stassi
Phone: (504) 920-6041
Email: libbystassi@gmail.com
Book Link: The Picture in His Wallet on Amazon
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