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Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry
"A writer traces his history-brushes with violence, responses to threat, poetic and political solidarity-in poems of lyric and narrative urgency. John Murillo's second book is a reflective look at the legacy of institutional, accepted violence against African Americans and the personal and societal wreckage wrought by long histories of subjugation. A sparrow trapped in a car window evokes a mother battered by a father's fists; a workout at an iron gym recalls a long-ago mentor who pushed the speaker "to become something unbreakable." The presence of these and poetic forbears-Gil Scott-Heron, Yusef Komunyakaa-provide a context for strength in the face of danger and anger. At the heart of the book is a sonnet crown triggered by the shooting deaths of three Brooklyn men that becomes an extended meditation on the history of racial injustice and the notion of payback as a form of justice. "Maybe memory is the only home / you get," Murillo writes, "and rage, where you/first learn how fragile the axis/upon which everything tilts.""--
Digest
From Epicurus to Sam Cooke, the Daily News to Roots, Digest draws from the present and the past to form an intellectual, American identity. In poems that forge their own styles and strategies, we experience dialogues between the written word and other art forms. Within this dialogue we hear Ben Jonson, we meet police K-9s, and we find children negotiating a sense of the world through a father's eyes and through their own.
The Arrangements
These reverberative poems locate and explore where body, mind and language meet
The Off-season
The poems in The Off-Season are populated with things--'90s TV shows, mixtapes, crosstown buses, winter beaches--signifiers that trace a trajectory from girlhood to adulthood and bring to the surface feelings and desires that ordinarily stay hidden. We witness the strangeness of modern life, relive our own adolescent awkwardness and listen in on conversations with dead poets, TV characters, family members and intimates. With humor, fierceness and generosity, The Off-Season grapples with the question of how to be in the world.
No Small Gift
Centered on the theme of regaining a voice, the collection manifests poetry's power to distill meaning from the chaos of trauma
Fantasia for the Man in Blue
"An examination of a brutal America through the voices of its most vulnerable sons. In his debut collection, Fantasia for the Man in Blue, Tommye Blount orchestrates a chorus of distinct, unforgettable voices that speak to the experience of the black, queer body as a site of desire and violence. A black man's late-night encounter with a police officer - the titular "man in blue" - becomes an extended meditation on a dangerous, erotic fantasy. The late Luther Vandross, resurrected here in a suite of poems, addresses the contradiction between his public persona and a life spent largely in the closet: "It's a calling, this hunger / to sing for a love I'm too ashamed to want for myself." In "Aaron McKinney Cleans His Magnum," the convicted killer imagines the barrel of the gun he used to bludgeon Matthew Shepherd as an "infant's small mouth" as well as the "sad calculator" that was "built to subtract from and divide a town." In these and other poems, Blount viscerally captures the experience of the "other" and locates us squarely within these personae"--
The Taxidermist's Cut
A survival guide that shows how bigotry and redemption are mapped on the psyche and on the body
Can I Finish, Please?
These poems offer consolation and authenticity in the multiplying possibilities of transformation, nature, and eroticism
January Machine
This long poem enacts the restless mind at work, which becomes the ground for action, for critique and for re-imagining America
What Happens Is Neither
"A deeply-sensorial reflection on presence, absence, and the act of losing "What Happens is Neither/ the end nor the beginning. /Yet we're wired to look for signs," offers the speaker of Angela Narciso Torres' latest collection, which approaches motherhood, aging, and mourning through a series of careful meditations. In music, mantra, and prayer, Torres explores the spaces in and around grief-in varying proximity to it and from different vantage points. She writes both structurally formal poems that enfold the emotionality of loss and free verse that loosens the latch on memory and lets us into the sensory worlds of the speaker's childhood and present. In poems set in two countries and homes, Torres considers what it means to leave a mark, vanish, and stay in one place. In a profound act of recollection and preservation, Torres shows us how to release part of ourselves but remain whole"--
