Books by Yusef Komunyakaa
I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head
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Dien Cai Dau
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Magic City /
Neon Vernacular
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Toys
in a Field
Thieves of Paradise /
Talking Dirty to
the Gods / Pleasure
Dome /
Jazz Poetry Anthology /
The Second Set /
Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy
Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and
Commentaries
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Untitled Blues
after a
photography by Yevgeni Yevtushenko
By Yusef Komunyakaa
I catch myself trying
to look into the eyes
of the photo, at a black
boy
behind a laughing white
mask
he's painted on. I
could've been that boy
years ago.
Sure, I could say
everything's copacetic,
listen to a Buddy Bolden's
cornet
cry from one of those
coffin-
shaped houses called
shotgun. We could
meet in Storyville,
famous for quadroons,
with drunks discussing God
around a honky-tonk piano.
We could pretend we can't
see the kitchen help
under a cloud of steam.
Other lurid snow jobs:
night & day, the city
clothed in her see-through
French lace, as pigeons
coo like a beggar chorus
among makeshift studios
on wheels--Vieux Carre
belles having portraits
painted
twenty years younger.
We could have jive
down on Bourbon & Conti
where tap dancers hold
to their last steps,
mammy dolls frozen
in glass cages. The boy
locked inside your camera,
perhaps he's lucky--
he knows how to steal
laughs in a place
where your skin
is your passport. |
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Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaa
Edited by
Shirley A. James Hanshaw
Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaa
brings together over two decades of
interviews and profiles with one of
America's most prolific and acclaimed
contemporary poets. Yusef Komunyakaa (b.
1947) describes his work alternately as
"word paintings" and as "music," and his
affinity with the visual and aural arts is
amply displayed in these conversations. The
volume also addresses the diversity and
magnitude of Komunyakaa's literary output.
His collaborations with artists in a variety
of genres, including music, dance, drama,
opera, and painting have produced
groundbreaking performance pieces.
Throughout the collection, Komunyakaa's
interest in finding and creating poetry
across the artistic spectrum is made
manifest. |
For his collection
Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems,
1977-1989, Komunyakaa became the first African American
male to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Through his
work he provides keen insight into life's mysteries from
seemingly inconsequential and insignificant life forms
("Ode to the Maggot") to some of the most compelling
historical and life-altering events of our time, such as
the Vietnam War ("Facing It"). Influenced strongly by
jazz, blues, and folklore, as well as the classical
poetic tradition, his poetry comprises a riveting
chronicle of the African American experience.
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update
2 February 2012
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