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After the Afterlife explores the zone between language and spirit. It is a book of inner and outer boundaries: of blockades, of tunnels, of wormholes. Where does our consciousness come from, and where is it going, if anywhere? With a nimble blend of wit, whimsy, and erudition, Hummer's poems assay the border that the shaman is forced to cross to wrestle with the gods, which is the same border the mystic yearns to broach, and the ordinary human stumbles over while doing laundry or making lunch--where questions of identity melt in the white heat of Being: which is like trying to teach The cat to waltz, so much awkwardness, so many tender advances, and I'm shocked when it actually learns, When it minces toward me in a tiny cocktail gown, offering a martini, asking for this dance, insisting on hearing me refuse To reply, debating all along, in the chorus of its interior mewing, who are you really, peculiar animal, who taught you to call you you.
"T. R. Hummer grew up in the Deep South and planned to become a musician before he met poetry. This musical influence is visible in his work: he often discusses poetry together with music (and sometimes the other way around), and his career has included both writing and performance. The present volume, Available Surfaces, focuses on the art of making both poetry and music and on the concept of "making" as well. Hummer draws on childhood experiences ("A Length of Hemp Rope"), adult experiences ("Hotel California"), experiences as a poet ("Available Surfaces"), and experiences as an explorer of unworldly spaces ("The Hive," "Brain Wave and the End of Science Fiction"). Hummer has published ten volumes of poetry with presses including Louisiana State University Press and the University of Illinois Press. His work has appeared in two anthology volumes published by Simon & Schuster and Cengage and in two Pushcart Prize anthologies. He has edited the Kenyon Review, the Georgia Review, and the Cimarron Review, among other journals. "--
In a work of startling originality, the T.R. Hummer's Ephemeron presents a meditation on ephemerality from the point of view of the ephemeron itself as it passes, be it the individual, the atom, the particle. Relentless in its stalking of the boundary between being and nonbeing, Hummer's work becomes a tour-de-force that shines a spotlight into dark corners of Being, revealing yet more darkness.
Music, race, politics, and conscience. In these eight essays written over the span of a decade and a half, T. R. Hummer explains how, for him, such abiding concerns revolve around the practice of poetry and the evolution of a culturally responsible personal poetics. Hummer writes about the suicide of poet Vachel Lindsay, the culture wars at the National Endowment for the Arts, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the divided soul of his native American South, and the salving, transcendent practice of musicianship. Inevitably entwined with a personal or cultural component, Hummer's criticism is thus grounded in experience that is always familiar and often straight to the heart in its rightness. In one ...
A collection of poems that explore the issues surrounding race relations in American society, told from the experience of Black, Native American, Asian, Arabic, Hispanic, and white cultures.
Hummer presents us with a hectoring witness compelled to translate the banal urban atrocities of our current civilization into complex testimonies and transcendent prophecies.
The Jamaican poet presents a collection of verse acknowledging her own ancestors and that of her craft.
A poetic study of the eternal, T. R. Hummer’s new collection Eon, as with the other volumes in this trilogy—Ephemeron and Skandalon—offers meditations on the brief arc of our existence, death, and beyond. With vivid, corporeal imagery and metaphysical flourishes, the poet explores how the dead influence the ways we understand ourselves. Anchored with a series of poems that can be read as extended epitaphs, the collection closes with a gesture toward the redemptive power of love. In the tradition of Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, and Philip Levine, Eon shows us the power of being “simple expressions of our earth. It imagined us, / And was imagined by something nameless in return.”
Poetry. "Whoever you are, take courage from these poems, for if they tell us that life's not for sissies, they also remind us that, in the end, we all have a shot at being heroes" - David Kirby. "Steve Gehrke's THE PYRAMIDS OF MALPIGHI is full of intelligence, passion, and surprise.This book promises great things to come, true enough-but it is already a great thing, challenging, weighty and satisfying"- T.R. Hummer.
Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Ralph Adamo -- Betty Adcock -- Claudia Emerson Andrews -- James Applewhite -- Alvin Aubert -- Gerald Barrax -- John Bensko -- Wendell Berry -- David Bottoms -- Cathy Smith Bowers -- Van K. Brock -- Jack Butler -- Turner Cassity -- Fred Chappell -- Stephen Corey -- Kate Daniels -- James Dickey -- R.H.W. Dillard -- Maudelle Driskell -- George Garrett -- Margaret Gibson -- R.S. Gwynn -- Jim Hall -- Andrew Hudgins -- T.R. Hummer -- Mark Jarman -- Rodney Jones -- Donald Justice -- Etheridge Knight -- Yusef Komunyakaa -- Rick Lott -- Susan Ludvigson -- Everette Maddox -- Cleopatra Mathis -- Walter McDonald -- Jo McDougall -- Heather Ross Miller -- Jim Wayne Miller -...