| Description |
vii, 161 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm |
| Contents |
Thataway -- Home recordings -- One the a train -- Swing -- Mercy rule -- Ode to the Harlem Globetrotters -- Ashe -- Shirts and skins -- I doubt it -- Two On the Atchison, Topeka & the Santa Fe. Ad astra per aspera -- Phys. ed. -- Ice storm 1984 -- History -- Dictation -- Dictation -- Booty Green -- Brown -- Field recordings. Three night train. James Brown at B. B. King's on New Years Eve -- Fishbone -- Lead belly's first grave -- It -- Ode to big pun -- De la soul is dead -- Ode to ol dirty bastard -- Four The crescent limited. B. B. King plays Oxford, Mississippi -- Bass -- Triptych for Trayvon Martin -- A Brown Atlanta boy watche basketball on West 4th. Meanwhile, Neo-Nazis March on Charlottesville, Virginia. -- Howlin' wolf -- Repast -- Whistle -- Money road -- Hive -- Notes & acknowledgements. |
| Summary |
"James Brown. John Brown's raid. Brown v. the Topeka Board of Ed.: the recently National Book Award-longlisted author of Blue Laws meditates on all things "brown" in this powerful new collection. Divided into "Home Recordings" and "Field Recordings," Brown speaks to the way personal experience is shaped by culture, while culture is forever affected by the personal, recalling a black, Kansas boyhood to comment on our times. From "History"--a song of Kansas high-school fixture Mr. W., who gave his students "the Sixties / minus Malcolm X, or Watts, / barely a march on Washington"--to "Money Road," a sobering pilgrimage to the site of Emmett Till's lynching, the poems engage place and the past and their intertwined power. These twenty-eight taut poems and poetic sequences, including an oratorio based on Mississippi "barkeep, activist, waiter" Booker Wright that was performed at Carnegie Hall and the vibrant sonnet cycle "De La Soul Is Dead," about the days when hip-hop was growing up ("we were black then, not yet / African American"), remind us that blackness and brownness tell an ongoing story. A testament to Young's own--and our collective--experience, Brown offers beautiful, sustained harmonies from a poet whose wisdom deepens with time"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Subject |
African Americans -- Poetry.
|
| ISBN |
9781524732547 (hardcover) |
|
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