Taboo
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
Format: Book
Edition: First edition.
Description: viii, 132 pages ; 22 cm.
The Paint-Box artists color in Adam & Eve, using every hue & cry of temptation. Because God blends into the darkness the faces keep coming off. --from "Chiaroscuro" With the allusive leaps and improvisational chops of a jazz soloist, Yusef Komunyakaa is our great poet of connectivity--the secret blood that links slave and master, explorer and native, stranger and brother. InTaboohe examines the role of blacks in Western history, and how these roles are portrayed in art and literature. In taut, meticulously crafted three-line stanzas, Rubens paints his wife looking longingly at a black servant; Aphra Behn writesOroonoko"as if she'd rehearsed it/for years in her spleen"; and in Monticello, Thomas Jefferson is "still at his neo-classical desk/musing, but we know his mind/is brushing aside abstractions/so his hands can touch flesh."Taboois the powerful first book in a new trilogy by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work never ceases to challenge and delight his readers.
Series: Komunyakaa, Yusef. Wishbone trilogy ; pt. 1.
Contents:
Lingo -- Imhotep -- Aghribat al-Arab -- Henry the Navigator -- Other worlds -- Bacchanal -- Astraea's footnotes -- Queen Marie-Therèse & Nabo -- Lament & praise song -- Sunset in Surinam -- Monticello -- Unframing a triptych -- Captain Amasa Delano's dilemma -- Before the windows -- Double exposure -- King of the octave -- The price of blood -- The quadroon's masque ball -- Antebellum silhouettes -- Tobe's blues -- Othello's robe -- Jeanne Duval's confession -- Hagar's daughter -- Chiaroscuro -- Nude study -- Trueblood's blues -- Satchmo, USA -- Cante jondo -- The house -- To beauty -- Daddy Red -- Twilight seduction -- Homage to a bellhop -- Forgive & live -- Séance & shadowplay -- Lustration -- Lucumi -- Oil -- At the Red Sea -- In line at the bank -- Troubling the water -- Netherworlds -- Lingua franca -- The archivist -- Desecration -- Outside the Blue Nile.
ISBN:
0374291489 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Availability | |||
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Call Number | Location | Shelf Location | Status |
LITERATURE Poetry Kom | Main (Downtown) | Third Level, Nonfiction | In |