Please Make Me Pretty, I Don't Want to Die
Poems
Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2022]
Format: Book
Description: viii, 84 pages ; 24 cm.
"Please make me pretty, I don't want to die is the first book of poetry by Tawanda Mulalu. In four parts named for the seasons, these poems bring together descriptions of everyday experiences and sensory memories with an overarching focus on the pleasures and difficulties of intimacy and the anomie of United States culture. An immigrant to the U.S. from Botswana, Mulalu explores facets of his life and identity in a powerful first-person voice, including his relationships, his immigration, and his work as a teacher's assistant in a third-grade classroom in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The collection juxtaposes traditional poetic styles such as sonnets and elegies with less orthodox interjections, such as craggy prose-poem "prayers" and other meditations, to create a poetic world both familiar and jarring-one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image ("The stars also suffer. Immense and dead, their gasses burn/ distant like castanets of antebellum teeth. My open window/ a synecdoche of country") or crystallize into lament: ("If I saw a starving/ black child my first thought would not be to take this picture of myself. Or wake. Everyone is dying. There/ are such pretty words for this.")"-- Provided by publisher.
Series: Princeton series of contemporary poets.
Contents:
Machine generated contents note: SUMMER -- Argo, My Argo -- Still Life -- Aria -- Miscegenation Elegy -- Connecticut -- Prayer -- Elegy -- Film Studies -- Pokimon Blue -- The World -- Symphony -- Song -- FALL -- My Sister Likes Girls and Does Not Return for My Mother's Fiftieth -- Shower pressure. My boxes arrive today -- Massachusetts -- Half past seven and -- Hamlet Tries Prozac -- Happy Haiku -- Renga -- Film Studies II -- November Elegy -- Prayer -- My Brother Does Not Return for My Mother's Fiftieth -- Near It -- WINTER -- All we got was autumn, all we got was winter -- Saturday morning my hair meets this drain -- Nearness -- Forgiveness Rock Record -- Elegy -- Second Sonnet -- Third Sonnet -- Film Studies III -- Newness -- Prayer -- Frenzy -- Not a Snow Day -- SPRI NC -- Good Long Poem -- Afterparty -- Ear -- Vertebrae -- Prayer -- Elegy -- Poem about My Life Mattering -- Aria -- After History -- American Elegy -- Poetry in America -- Clarity.
Subjects:
African Americans -- Poetry.
Botswanans -- United States -- Poetry.
Immigrants -- United States -- Poetry.
Intimacy (Psychology) -- Poetry.
African Americans -- Poetry.
Botswanans -- United States -- Poetry.
Immigrants -- United States -- Poetry.
Intimacy (Psychology) -- Poetry.
ISBN:
9780691239033
Availability | |||
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Call Number | Location | Shelf Location | Status |
LITERATURE Poetry Mul | Main (Downtown) | Third Level, Nonfiction | In |