Synopses & Reviews
The Paint-Box artists color in Adam & Eve, using every hue & cryof temptation. Because God blends into the darkness the faces keep coming off.--from "Chiaroscuro"With the allusive leaps and improvisational chops of a jazz soloist, Yusef Komunyakaa is our great poet of connectivity--the secret blood that links slave and master, explorer and native, stranger and brother. In Taboo he examines the role of blacks in Western history, and how these roles are portrayed in art and literature. In taut, meticulously crafted three-line stanzas, Rubens paints his wife looking longingly at a black servant; Aphra Behn writes Oroonoko "as if she'd rehearsed it/for years in her spleen"; and in Monticello, Thomas Jefferson is "still at his neo-classical desk/musing, but we know his mind/is brushing aside abstractions/so his hands can touch flesh." Taboo is the powerful first book in a new trilogy by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work never ceases to challenge and delight his readers.
Review
"[Yusef Komunyakaa] has a near-revelatory capacity to give himself over to his subject matter and to the taut concision of his free verse . . . Dazzling." --David Wojahn,
Poetry "Komunyakaa wonderfully achieves the combined mischief and moralizing of Catullus, one of his acknowledged heroes . . . He refuses to be trivial; and he even dares beauty." --April Bernard, The New York Times Book Review "[Taboo] calls to mind Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman--the private gaze and the civic drum, purifying language, purifying history." --Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, Washington Post Book World
Review
"Middle age, masculinity, competition, religion, football, and the art of poetry itself spin together into powerful ironies in some of the best poems Jones has created so far: 'I had a dream,' one begins, 'of harnessing and exacting irrevocable power over others... in the cleat-pocked, dried dirt of a practice field.'" --Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
With the allusive leaps and improvisational chops of a jazz soloist, Yusef Komunyakaa is our great poet of connectivity--the secret blood that links slave and master, explorer and native, stranger and brother. In Taboo he examines the role of blacks in Western history, and how these roles are portrayed in art and literature. In taut, meticulously crafted three-line stanzas, Rubens paints his wife looking longingly at a black servant; Aphra Behn writes Oroonoko "as if she'd rehearsed it/for years in her spleen"; and in Monticello, Thomas Jefferson is "still/at his neo-classical desk/musing, but we know his mind/is brushing aside abstractions/so his hands can touch flesh." Taboo is the powerful first book in a new trilogy by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work never ceases to challenge and delight his readers.
Synopsis
A new collection from a Kingsley Tufts Award-winning poet
Imaginary Logic is a brilliantly expansive, deeply meditative, and at times wildly imaginative collection of poems that combines Rodney Joness distinctive storytelling ability, sharp social intelligence, and keen powers of observation in a book that is wistful, satiric, audacious, and remorseless. “The Art of Heaven” opens with a parody of Dante and a down-home, twisted humor that Joness readers have come to rely on: “In the middle of my life I came to a dark wood, / the smell of barbecue, kids running in the yards. / Not deep depression. This nice hell of suburbs. / Speed bumps. The way things arent quite paradise.” Rodney Jones, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, is one of Americas “best, most generous, and most brilliantly readable poets” (
Poetry).
Imaginary Logic is the most eloquent expression yet of his rigorous mind, scrupulous eye, and capacious heart.
Synopsis
A new collection from a Kingsley Tufts Award–winning poet
Imaginary Logicis a brilliantly expansive, deeply meditative, and at times wildly imaginative collection of poems that combines Rodney Joness distinctive storytelling ability, sharp social intelligence, and keen powers of observation in a book that is wistful, satiric, audacious, and remorseless.
Rodney Jones, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, is one of Americas "best, most generous, and most brilliantly readable poets" (Poetry).Imaginary Logicis the most eloquent expression yet of his rigorous mind, scrupulous eye, and capacious heart.
Synopsis
A collection of 35 new poems that will reinforce Rodney Jones's reputation as one of America's most versatile narrative poets.
About the Author
Yusef Komunyakaa's eleven books of poems include Talking Dirty to the Gods (FSG, 2000) and Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at Princeton University.
Table of Contents
ContentsIMAGINARY LOGIC
In the Days of Magical Realism 3
Voice Making the Sounds of Engines 4
Ambition 6
On Fiction 7
The Competition of Prayers 9
On Criticism 12
Feelings, by Ashley Higgins 13
The Elementary Principles of Rhetoric 15
The Heaven of Self-Pity 16
The Ante 17
Confidential Advice 19
Starstruck 21
The End of Practice 23
Winning 25
Metaphors for the Trance 27
Rememberer 28
Hubris at Zunzal 30
Last Man Standing 31
IN MEDIA RES
Two Quick Scenes from the Late Sixties 35
The Essence of Man 39
Deathly 41
In Media Res 43
What Is True for a Minute 45
The Previous Tenants 47
Cathedral 57
RELIQUARY OF THE OTHER WORLD
The Art of Heaven 61
The Moons: Notes on the Formation of Self 64
The Poem of Fountains 67
The Trip to Opelika 71
The Eviction 75
North Alabama Endtime 78
Lines for the Joe Wheeler Rural Electric Cooperative 81
Acknowledgments 83