66 Books Published by Graywolf Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Click for more detail about Fat Time and Other Stories by Jeffery Renard Allen Fat Time and Other Stories

by Jeffery Renard Allen
Graywolf Press (Jun 20, 2023)
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A ferocious, innovative story collection about Black lives in the past, present, and future

In Fat Time and Other Stories, Jimi Hendrix, Francis Bacon, the boxer Jack Johnson, Miles Davis, and a space-age Muhammad Ali find themselves in the otherworldly hands of Jeffery Renard Allen, reimagined and transformed to bring us news of America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Along with them are characters of Allen’s invention: two teenagers in an unnamed big city who stumble through a down-low relationship; an African preachervisits a Christian religious retreat to speak on the evils of fornication in an Italian villa importedto America by Abraham Lincoln; and an albino revolutionary who struggles with leading his people into conflict.

The two strands in this brilliant story collection—speculative history and tender, painful depictions of Black life in urban America—are joined by African notions of circular time in which past, present, and future exist all at once. Here the natural and supernatural, the sacred and the profane, the real and fantastical, destruction and creation are held in delicate and tense balance. Allen’s work has been said to extend the tradition of Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Henry Roth, and Ishmael Reed, but he is blazing his own path through American literature. Fat Time and Other Stories brilliantly shows the range and depth of his imagination.


Click for more detail about Saltwater Demands a Psalm: Poems by Kweku Abimbola Saltwater Demands a Psalm: Poems

by Kweku Abimbola
Graywolf Press (Apr 04, 2023)
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In Ghana’s Akan tradition, on the eighth day of life a child is named according to the day of the week on which they were born. This marks their true birth. In Kweku Abimbola’s rhapsodic debut, the intimacy of this practice yields an intricately layered poetics of time and body based in Black possibility, ancestry, and joy. While odes and praise songs celebrate rituals of self- and collective-care--of durags, stank faces, and dance--Abimbola’s elegies imagine alternate lives and afterlives for those slain by police, returning to naming as a means of rebirth and reconnection following the lost understanding of time and space that accompanies Black death.

Saltwater Demands a Psalm creates a cosmology in search of Black eternity governed by Adinkra symbols--pictographs central to Ghanaian language and culture in their proverbial meanings--and rooted in units of time created from the rhythms of Black life.These poems groove, remix, and recenter African language and spiritual practice to rejoice in liberation’s struggles and triumphs. Abimbola’s poetry invokes the ecstasy and sorrow of saying the names of the departed, of seeing and being seen, of being called and calling back.


Click for more detail about Black and Female: Essays by Tsitsi Dangarembga Black and Female: Essays

by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Graywolf Press (Jan 17, 2023)
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The first wound for all of us who are classified as “black” is empire.

In Black and Female, Tsitsi Dangarembga examines the legacy of imperialism on her own life and on every aspect of black embodied African life.

This paradigm-shifting essay collection weaves the personal and political in an illuminating exploration of race and gender. Dangarembga recounts a painful separation from her parents as a toddler, connecting this experience to the ruptures caused in Africa by human trafficking and enslavement. She argues that, after independence, the ruling party in Zimbabwe only performed inclusion for women while silencing the work of self-actualized feminists. She describes her struggles to realize her ambitions in theater, film, and literature, laying out the long path to the publication of her novels.

At once philosophical, intimate, and urgent, Black and Female is a powerful testimony of the pervasive and long-lasting effects of racism and patriarchy that provides an ultimately hopeful vision for change. Black feminists are “the status quo’s worst nightmare.” Dangarembga writes, “our conviction is deep, bolstered by a vivid imagination that reminds us that other realities are possible beyond the one that obtains.”


Click for more detail about Dr. No by Percival Everett Dr. No

by Percival Everett
Graywolf Press (Nov 01, 2022)
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Everett won the prestigious PEN/Jean Stein Award, for Dr. No

A sly, madcap novel about supervillains and nothing, really, from an American novelist whose star keeps rising

The protagonist of Percival Everett’s puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means “nothing” in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for “nothing.”) He is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it. This makes him the perfect partner for the aspiring villain John Sill, who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal, well, not gold bars but a shoebox containing nothing. Once he controls nothing he’ll proceed with a dastardly plan to turn a Massachusetts town into nothing. Or so he thinks.

With the help of the brainy and brainwashed astrophysicist-turned-henchwoman Eigen Vector, our professor tries to foil the villain while remaining in his employ. In the process, Wala Kitu learns that Sill’s desire to become a literal Bond villain originated in some real all-American villainy related to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. As Sill says, “Professor, think of it this way. This country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it’s time we gave nothing back.”

Dr. No is a caper with teeth, a wildly mischievous novel from one of our most inventive, provocative, and productive writers. That it is about nothing isn’t to say that it’s not about anything. In fact, it’s about villains. Bond villains. And that’s not nothing.

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Click for more detail about Concentrate: Poems by Courtney Faye Taylor Concentrate: Poems

by Courtney Faye Taylor
Graywolf Press (Nov 01, 2022)
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Winner of the 2021 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

In her virtuosic debut, Courtney Faye Taylor explores the under-told history of the murder of Latasha Harlins—a fifteen-year-old Black girl killed by a Korean shop owner, Soon Ja Du, after being falsely accused of shoplifting a bottle of orange juice. Harlins’s murder and the following trial, which resulted in no prison time for Du, were inciting incidents of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and came to exemplify the long-fraught relationship between Black and Asian American communities in the United States. Through a collage-like approach to collective history and storytelling, Taylor’s poems present a profound look into the insidious points at which violence originates against—and between—women of color.

Concentrate displays an astounding breadth of form and experimentation in found texts, micro-essays, and visual poems, merging worlds and bending time in order to interrogate inexorable encounters with American patriarchy and White supremacy manifested as sexual and racially charged violence. These poems demand absolute focus on Black womanhood’s relentless refusal to be unseen, even and especially when such luminosity exposes an exceptional vulnerability to harm and erasure. Taylor’s inventive, intimate book radically reconsiders the cost of memory, forging a path to a future rooted in solidarity and possibility. “Concentrate,” she writes. “We have decisions to make. Fire is that decision to make.”


Click for more detail about Mother Country by Jacinda Townsend Mother Country

by Jacinda Townsend
Graywolf Press (May 03, 2022)
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Saddled with student loans, medical debt, and the sudden news of her infertility after a major car accident, Shannon, an African American woman, follows her boyfriend to Morocco in search of relief. There, in the cobblestoned medina of Marrakech, she finds a toddler in a pink jacket whose face mirrors her own. With the help of her boyfriend and a bribed official, Shannon makes the fateful decision to adopt and raise the girl in Louisville, Kentucky. But the girl already has a mother: Souria, an undocumented Mauritanian woman who was trafficked as a teen, and who managed to escape to Morocco to build another life.

In rendering Souria’s separation from her family across vast stretches of desert and Shannon’s alienation from her mother under the same roof, Jacinda Townsend brilliantly stages cycles of intergenerational trauma and healing. Linked by the girl who has been a daughter to them both, these unforgettable protagonists move toward their inevitable reckoning. Mother Country is a bone-deep and unsparing portrayal of the ethical and emotional claims we make upon one another in the name of survival, in the name of love.


Click for more detail about Against Heaven: Poems by Kemi Alabi Against Heaven: Poems

by Kemi Alabi
Graywolf Press (Apr 05, 2022)
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Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Claudia Rankine.

Kemi Alabi’s transcendent debut reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born, troubling the waters of some of our country’s central and ordained fictions—those mythic politics of respectability, resilience, and redemption. Instead of turning to a salvation that has been forced upon them, Alabi turns to the body and the earth as sites of paradise defined by the pleasure and possibility of Black, queer fugitivity. Through tender love poems, righteous prayers, and vital provocations, we see the colonizers we carry within ourselves being laid to rest.

Against Heaven is a praise song made for the flames of a burning empire—a freedom dream that shapeshifts into boundless multiplicities for the wounds made in the name of White supremacy and its gods. Alabi has written an astonishing collection of magnificent range, commanding the full spectrum of the Black, queer spirit’s capacity for magic, love, and ferocity in service of healing—the highest power there is.


Click for more detail about Such Color: New and Selected Poems by Tracy K. Smith Such Color: New and Selected Poems

by Tracy K. Smith
Graywolf Press (Oct 05, 2021)
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Celebrated for its extraordinary intelligence and exhilarating range, the poetry of Tracy K. Smith opens up vast questions. Such Color: New and Selected Poems, her first career-spanning volume, traces an increasingly audacious commitment to exploring the unknowable, the immense mysteries of existence. Each of Smith’s four collections moves farther outward: when one seems to reach the limits of desire and the body, the next investigates the very sweep of history; when one encounters death and the outer reaches of space, the next bears witness to violence against language and people from across time and delves into the rescuing possibilities of the everlasting. Smith’s signature voice, whether in elegy or praise or outrage, insists upon vibrancy and hope, even—and especially—in moments of inconceivable travesty and grief.

Such Color collects the best poems from Smith’s award-winning books and culminates in thirty pages of brilliant, excoriating new poems. These new works confront America’s historical and contemporary racism and injustices, while they also rise toward the registers of the ecstatic, the rapturous, and the sacred—urging us toward love as a resistance to everything that impedes it. This magnificent retrospective affirms Smith’s place as one of the twenty-first century’s most treasured poets.


Click for more detail about The Trees by Percival Everett The Trees

by Percival Everett
Graywolf Press (Sep 21, 2021)
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An uncanny literary thriller addressing the painful legacy of lynching in the US, by the author of Telephone

Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.

The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in a fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.


Click for more detail about Walking on Cowrie Shells: Stories by Nana Nkweti Walking on Cowrie Shells: Stories

by Nana Nkweti
Graywolf Press (Jun 01, 2021)
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A “boisterous and high-spirited debut” (Kirkus starred review)“that enthralls the reader through their every twist and turn” (Publishers Weekly starred review), named one of the Most Anticipated Books for Brittle Paper, The Millions, and The Rumpus, penned by a finalist for the AKO Caine Prize

In her powerful, genre-bending debut story collection, Nana Nkweti’s virtuosity is on full display as she mixes deft realism with clever inversions of genre. In the Caine Prize finalist story “It Takes a Village, Some Say,” Nkweti skewers racial prejudice and the practice of international adoption, delivering a sly tale about a teenage girl who leverages her adoptive parents to fast-track her fortunes. In “The Devil Is a Liar,” a pregnant pastor’s wife struggles with the collision of western Christianity and her mother’s traditional Cameroonian belief system as she worries about her unborn child.

In other stories, Nkweti vaults past realism, upending genre expectations in a satirical romp about a jaded PR professional trying to spin a zombie outbreak in West Africa, and in a mermaid tale about a Mami Wata who forgoes her power by remaining faithful to a fisherman she loves. In between these two ends of the spectrum there’s everything from an aspiring graphic novelist at a comic con to a murder investigation driven by statistics to a story organized by the changing hairstyles of the main character.

Pulling from mystery, horror, realism, myth, and graphic novels, Nkweti showcases the complexity and vibrance of characters whose lives span Cameroonian and American cultures. A dazzling, inventive debut, Walking on Cowrie Shells announces the arrival of a superlative new voice.


Click for more detail about Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga Nervous Conditions

by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Graywolf Press (May 18, 2021)
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A modern classic from the Booker-shortlisted author of This Mournable Body

The groundbreaking first novel in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s award-winning trilogy, Nervous Conditions, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and has been “hailed as one of the 20th century’s most significant works of African literature” (The New York Times). Two decades before Zimbabwe would win independence and ended white minority rule, thirteen-year-old Tambudzai Sigauke embarks on her education. On her shoulders rest the economic hopes of her parents, siblings, and extended family, and within her burns the desire for independence. She yearns to be free of the constraints of her rural village and thinks she’s found her way out when her wealthy uncle offers to sponsor her schooling. But she soon learns that the education she receives at his mission school comes with a price.


Click for more detail about The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga The Book of Not

by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Graywolf Press (May 18, 2021)
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The powerful sequel to Nervous Conditions, by the Booker-shortlisted author of This Mournable Body<.em>

The Book of Not continues the saga of Tambudzai, picking up where Nervous Conditions left off. As Tambu begins secondary school at the Young Ladies’ College of the Sacred Heart, she is still reeling from the personal losses that have been war has inflicted upon her family—her uncle and sister were injured in a mine explosion. Soon she’ll come face to face with discriminatory practices at her mostly-white school. And when she graduates and begins a job at an advertising agency, she realizes that the political and historical forces that threaten to destroy the fabric of her community are outside the walls of the school as well. Tsitsi Dangarembga, honored with the 2021 PEN Award for Freedom of Expression, digs deep into the damage colonialism and its education system does to Tambu’s sense of self amid the struggle for Zimbabwe’s independence, resulting in a brilliant and incisive second novel.


Click for more detail about The Renunciations: Poems by Donika Kelly The Renunciations: Poems

by Donika Kelly
Graywolf Press (May 04, 2021)
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An extraordinary collection of endurance and transformation by the award-winning author of Bestiary

The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one’s sense of self in the face of trauma. Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and the breaking marriage of that adult child, Donika Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended. These poems construct life rafts and sanctuaries even in their most devastating confrontations with what a person can bear, with how families harm themselves. With the companionship of "the oracle"—an observer of memory who knows how each close call with oblivion ends—the act of remembrance becomes curative, and personal mythologies give way to a future defined less by wounds than by possibility.

In this gorgeous and heartrending second collection, we find the home one builds inside oneself after reckoning with a legacy of trauma—a home whose construction starts "with a razing."


Click for more detail about Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine Just Us: An American Conversation

by Claudia Rankine
Graywolf Press (Sep 08, 2020)
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Claudia Rankine’s Citizen changed the conversation—Just Us urges all of us into it

As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history.

Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine’s questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces—the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth—where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect.

This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend’s explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine’s own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word.

Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine’s most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.


Click for more detail about The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir by Wayétu Moore The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir

by Wayétu Moore
Graywolf Press (Jun 02, 2020)
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An engrossing memoir of escaping the First Liberian Civil War and building a life in the United States

When Wayétu Moore turns five years old, her father and grandmother throw her a big birthday party at their home in Monrovia, Liberia, but all she can think about is how much she misses her mother, who is working and studying in faraway New York. Before she gets the reunion her father promised her, war breaks out in Liberia. The family is forced to flee their home on foot, walking and hiding for three weeks until they arrive in the village of Lai. Finally, a rebel soldier smuggles them across the border to Sierra Leone, reuniting the family and setting them off on yet another journey, this time to the United States.

Spanning this harrowing journey in Moore’s early childhood, her years adjusting to life in Texas as a black woman and an immigrant, and her eventual return to Liberia, The Dragons, the Giant, the Women is a deeply moving story of the search for home in the midst of upheaval. Moore has a novelist’s eye for suspense and emotional depth, and this unforgettable memoir is full of imaginative, lyrical flights and lush prose. In capturing both the hazy magic and the stark realities of what is becoming an increasingly pervasive experience, Moore shines a light on the great political and personal forces that continue to affect many migrants around the world, and calls us all to acknowledge the tenacious power of love and family.


Click for more detail about Telephone by Percival Everett Telephone

by Percival Everett
Graywolf Press (May 05, 2020)
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An astonishing new novel of loss and grief from “one of our culture’s preeminent novelists” —Los Angeles Times

Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area—the geological history of a cave forty-four meters above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon—he is a laconic man who plays chess with his daughter, trades puns with his wife while she does yoga, and dodges committee work at the college where he teaches.

After a field trip to the desert yields nothing more than a colleague with a tenure problem and a student with an unwelcome crush on him, Wells returns home to find his world crumbling. His daughter has lost her edge at chess, she has developed mysterious eye problems, and her memory has lost its grasp. Powerless in the face of his daughter’s slow deterioration, he finds a mysterious note asking for help tucked into the pocket of a jacket he’s ordered off eBay. Desperate for someone to save, he sets off to New Mexico in secret on a quixotic rescue mission.

A deeply affecting story about the lengths to which loss and grief will drive us, Telephone is a Percival Everett novel we should have seen coming all along, one that will shake you to the core as it asks questions about the power of narrative to save.


Click for more detail about Homie: Poems by Danez Smith Homie: Poems

by Danez Smith
Graywolf Press (Jan 21, 2020)
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Danez Smith is our president

Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family—blood and chosen—arrives with just the right food and some redemption. Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez’s friends and for you and for yours.


Click for more detail about She Would Be King: A Novel by Wayétu Moore She Would Be King: A Novel

by Wayétu Moore
Graywolf Press (Sep 03, 2019)
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A novel of exhilarating range, magical realism, and history?a dazzling retelling of Liberia’s formationWayétu Moore’s powerful debut novel, She Would Be King, reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond. Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him. When the three meet in the settlement of Monrovia, their gifts help them salvage the tense relationship between the African American settlers and the indigenous tribes, as a new nation forms around them.Moore’s intermingling of history and magical realism finds voice not just in these three characters but also in the fleeting spirit of the wind, who embodies an ancient wisdom. “If she was not a woman,” the wind says of Gbessa, “she would be king.” In this vibrant story of the African diaspora, Moore, a talented storyteller and a daring writer, illuminates with radiant and exacting prose the tumultuous roots of a country inextricably bound to the United States. She Would Be King is a novel of profound depth set against a vast canvas and a transcendent debut from a major new author.


Click for more detail about The White Card: A Play by Claudia Rankine The White Card: A Play

by Claudia Rankine
Graywolf Press (Mar 19, 2019)
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A play about the imagined fault line between black and white lives by Claudia Rankine, the author of Citizen

The White Card stages a conversation that is both informed and derailed by the black/white American drama. The scenes in this one-act play, for all the characters’ disagreements, stalemates, and seeming impasses, explore what happens if one is willing to stay in the room when it is painful to bear the pressure to listen and the obligation to respond.
?from the introduction by Claudia RankineClaudia Rankine’s first published play, The White Card, poses the essential question: Can American society progress if whiteness remains invisible?Composed of two scenes, the play opens with a dinner party thrown by Virginia and Charles, an influential Manhattan couple, for the up-and-coming artist Charlotte. Their conversation about art and representations of race spirals toward the devastation of Virginia and Charles’s intentions. One year later, the second scene brings Charlotte and Charles into the artist’s studio, and their confrontation raises both the stakes and the questions of what?and who?is actually on display.Rankine’s The White Card is a moving and revelatory distillation of racial divisions as experienced in the white spaces of the living room, the art gallery, the theater, and the imagination itself.


Click for more detail about This Mournable Body: A Novel by Tsitsi Dangarembga This Mournable Body: A Novel

by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Graywolf Press (Aug 07, 2018)
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A searing novel about the obstacles facing women in Zimbabwe, by one of the country’s most notable authorsAnxious about her prospects after leaving a stagnant job, Tambudzai finds herself living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare. For reasons that include her grim financial prospects and her age, she moves to a widow’s boarding house and eventually finds work as a biology teacher. But at every turn in her attempt to make a life for herself, she is faced with a fresh humiliation, until the painful contrast between the future she imagined and her daily reality ultimately drives her to a breaking point.In This Mournable Body, Tsitsi Dangarembga returns to the protagonist of her acclaimed first novel, Nervous Conditions, to examine how the hope and potential of a young girl and a fledgling nation can sour over time and become a bitter and floundering struggle for survival. As a last resort, Tambudzai takes an ecotourism job that forces her to return to her parents’ impoverished homestead. It is this homecoming, in Dangarembga’s tense and psychologically charged novel, that culminates in an act of betrayal, revealing just how toxic the combination of colonialism and capitalism can be.


Click for more detail about A Lucky Man: Stories  by Jamel Brinkley A Lucky Man: Stories

by Jamel Brinkley
Graywolf Press (May 08, 2018)
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In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J’Ouvert can’t help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history.

Jamel Brinkley’s stories, in a debut that announces the arrival of a significant new voice, reflect the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class―where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.


Click for more detail about Wade in the Water: Poems by Tracy K. Smith Wade in the Water: Poems

by Tracy K. Smith
Graywolf Press (Apr 03, 2018)
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The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United StatesEven the men in black armor, the ones
Jangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they so buffered against, if not love’s blade
Sizing up the heart’s familiar meat?We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.
Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.Love: naked almost in the everlasting street,
Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze.?from “Unrest in Baton Rouge”In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America’s contemporary moment both to our nation’s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith’s signature voice?inquisitive, lyrical, and wry?turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection widens to include erasures of The Declaration of Independence and the correspondence between slave owners, a found poem comprised of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors’ reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets.


Click for more detail about Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News by Kevin Young Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News

by Kevin Young
Graywolf Press (Nov 14, 2017)
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Has the hoax now moved from the sideshow to take the center stage of American culture?Award-winning poet and critic Kevin Young tours us through a rogue’s gallery of hoaxers, plagiarists, forgers, and fakers?from the humbug of P. T. Barnum and Edgar Allan Poe to the unrepentant bunk of JT LeRoy and Donald J. Trump. Bunk traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon, examining what motivates hucksters and makes the rest of us so gullible. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like Joice Heth, a black woman whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington, and What Is It?, an African American man Barnum professed was a newly discovered missing link in evolution.

Bunk then turns to the hoaxing of history and the ways that forgers, plagiarists, and journalistic fakers invent backstories and falsehoods to sell us lies about themselves and about the world in our own time, from pretend Native Americans Grey Owl and Nasdijj to the deadly imposture of Clark Rockefeller, from the made-up memoirs of James Frey to the identity theft of Rachel Dolezal. In this brilliant and timely work, Young asks what it means to live in a post-factual world of “truthiness” where everything is up for interpretation and everyone is subject to a pervasive cynicism that damages our ideas of reality, fact, and art.


Click for more detail about Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems by Danez Smith Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems

by Danez Smith
Graywolf Press (Sep 05, 2017)
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The highly anticipated second collection by Danez Smith?“Hallelujah is an understatement” (Patricia Smith)Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality?the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood?and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “Some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America?“Dear White America”?where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.


Click for more detail about The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story by Edwidge Danticat The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story

by Edwidge Danticat
Graywolf Press (Jul 11, 2017)
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A moving reflection on a subject that touches us all, by the bestselling author of Claire of the Sea Light.

Edwidge Danticat’s The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story is at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work. “Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses,” Danticat notes in her introduction. “I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing.” The book moves outward from the shock of her mother’s diagnosis and sifts through Danticat’s writing life and personal history, all the while shifting fluidly from examples that range from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude to Toni Morrison’s Sula. The narrative, which continually circles the many incarnations of death from individual to large-scale catastrophes, culminates in a beautiful, heartrending prayer in the voice of Danticat’s mother. A moving tribute and a work of astute criticism, The Art of Death is a book that will profoundly alter all who encounter it.


Click for more detail about So Much Blue by Percival Everett So Much Blue

by Percival Everett
Graywolf Press (Jun 13, 2017)
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A new high point for a master novelist, an emotionally charged reckoning with art, marriage, and the past

Kevin Pace is working on a painting that he won’t allow anyone to see: not his children; not his best friend, Richard; not even his wife, Linda. The painting is a canvas of twelve feet by twenty-one feet (and three inches) that is covered entirely in shades of blue. It may be his masterpiece or it may not; he doesn’t know or, more accurately, doesn’t care.

What Kevin does care about are the events of the past. Ten years ago he had an affair with a young watercolorist in Paris. Kevin relates this event with a dispassionate air, even a bit of puzzlement. It’s not clear to him why he had the affair, but he can’t let it go. In the more distant past of the late seventies, Kevin and Richard traveled to El Salvador on the verge of war to retrieve Richard’s drug-dealing brother, who had gone missing without explanation. As the events of the past intersect with the present, Kevin struggles to justify the sacrifices he’s made for his art and the secrets he’s kept from his wife.

So Much Blue features Percival Everett at his best, and his deadpan humor and insightful commentary about the artistic life culminate in a brilliantly readable new novel.


Click for more detail about Bestiary: Poems by Donika Kelly Bestiary: Poems

by Donika Kelly
Graywolf Press (Oct 11, 2016)
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Donika Kelly’s bold debut collection, longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award and winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

I thought myself lion and serpent. Thought
myself body enough for two, for we.
Found comfort in never being lonely.
What burst from my back, from my bones, what lived
along the ridge from crown to crown, from mane
to forked tongue beneath the skin. What clamor
we made in the birthing. What hiss and rumble
at the splitting, at the horns and beard,
at the glottal bleat. What bridges our back.
What strong neck, what bright eye. What menagerie
are we. What we’ve made of ourselves.

—from Love Poem: Chimera

Throughout this remarkable book, readers encounter animals, legendary creatures, and mythological beasts—entities that are half-human and half something other. Bestiary by Donika Kelly serves as a catalogue of such beings—from the familiar like whales and ostriches to the fantastical such as pegasi and chimeras to centaurs and griffins. Interspersed among these are poems exploring themes of love, self-discovery, and travel, both out west and back east. At the heart of this diverse and multifaceted collection is a poignant sequence, probing the depths of what makes one a monster in the harsh light of survival and introspection. Selected with an introduction by National Book Award laureate Nikky Finney, Bestiary ponders over what it means to be human and what makes us complete.


Click for more detail about Blackass: A Novel by A. Igoni Barrett Blackass: A Novel

by A. Igoni Barrett
Graywolf Press (Mar 01, 2016)
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Furo Wariboko, a young Nigerian, awakes the morning before a job interview to find that he’s been transformed into a white man. In this condition he plunges into the bustle of Lagos to make his fortune. With his red hair, green eyes, and pale skin, it seems he’s been completely changed. Well, almost. There is the matter of his family, his accent, his name. Oh, and his black ass. Furo must quickly learn to navigate a world made unfamiliar and deal with those who would use him for their own purposes. Taken in by a young woman called Syreeta and pursued by a writer named Igoni, Furo lands his first-ever job, adopts a new name, and soon finds himself evolving in unanticipated ways.A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass is a fierce comic satire that touches on everything from race to social media while at the same time questioning the values society places on us simply by virtue of the way we look. As he did in Love Is Power, or Something Like That, Barrett brilliantly depicts life in contemporary Nigeria and details the double-dealing and code-switching that are implicit in everyday business. But it’s Furo’s search for an identity—one deeper than skin—that leads to the final unraveling of his own carefully constructed story.


Click for more detail about Half an Inch of Water: Stories by Percival Everett Half an Inch of Water: Stories

by Percival Everett
Graywolf Press (Sep 15, 2015)
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A new collection of stories set in the West from "one of the most gifted and versatile of contemporary writers" (NPR)Percival Everett’s long-awaited new collection of stories, his first since 2004’s Damned If I Do, finds him traversing the West with characteristic restlessness. A deaf Native American girl wanders off into the desert and is found untouched in a den of rattlesnakes. A young boy copes with the death of his sister by angling for an unnaturally large trout in the creek where she drowned. An old woman rides her horse into a mountain snowstorm and sees a long-dead beloved dog. For the plainspoken men and women of these stories?fathers and daughters, sheriffs and veterinarians?small events trigger sudden shifts in which the ordinary becomes unfamiliar. A harmless comment about how to ride a horse changes the course of a relationship, a snakebite gives rise to hallucinations, and the hunt for a missing man reveals his uncanny resemblance to an actor. Half an Inch of Water tears through the fabric of the everyday to examine what lies beneath the surface of these lives. In the hands of master storyteller Everett, the act of questioning leads to vistas more strange and unsettling than could ever have been expected.


Click for more detail about Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine Citizen: An American Lyric

by Claudia Rankine
Graywolf Press (Oct 07, 2014)
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* Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry *
* Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism * Winner of the NAACP Image Award * Winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize * Winner of the PEN Open Book Award *

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:
The New Yorker, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, NPR. Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Slate, Time Out New York, Vulture, Refinery 29, and many more …

A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine’s long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.

Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.


Click for more detail about Song Of The Shank: A Novel by Jeffery Renard Allen Song Of The Shank: A Novel

by Jeffery Renard Allen
Graywolf Press (Jun 17, 2014)
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A contemporary American masterpiece about music, race, an unforgettable man, and an unreal America during the Civil War era

At the heart of this remarkable novel is Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century slave and improbable musical genius who performed under the name Blind Tom.
Song of the Shank opens in 1866 as Tom and his guardian, Eliza Bethune, struggle to adjust to their fashionable apartment in the city in the aftermath of riots that had driven them away a few years before. But soon a stranger arrives from the mysterious island of Edgemere—inhabited solely by African settlers and black refugees from the war and riots—who intends to reunite Tom with his now-liberated mother.
As the novel ranges from Tom’s boyhood to the heights of his performing career, the inscrutable savant is buffeted by opportunistic teachers and crooked managers, crackpot healers and militant prophets. In his symphonic novel, Jeffery Renard Allen blends history and fantastical invention to bring to life a radical cipher, a man who profoundly changes all who encounter him.


Click for more detail about Glyph by Percival Everett Glyph

by Percival Everett
Graywolf Press (Feb 18, 2014)
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In paperback for the first time, the much-beloved satirical novel The New York Times praised as "both a treatise and a romp"

Baby Ralph has ways to pass the time in his crib—but they don’t include staring at a mobile. Aided by his mother, he reads voraciously: "All of Swift, all of Sterne, Invisible Man, Baldwin, Joyce, Balzac, Auden, Roethke," along with a generous helping of philosophy, semiotics, and trashy thrillers. He’s also fond of writing poems and stories (in crayon). But Ralph has limits. He’s mute by choice and can’t drive, so in his own estimation he’s not a genius. Unfortunately for him, everyone else disagrees. His psychiatrist kidnaps him for testing, and once his brilliance is quantified (IQ: 475), a Pentagon officer also abducts him. Diabolically funny and lacerating in its critique of poststructuralism, Glyph has the feverish plot of a thriller and the philosophical depth of a text by Roland Barthes. If anyone can map the wilds of literary theory, it’s Ralph, one of Percival Everett’s most enduring creations.


Click for more detail about Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary by Harryette Mullen Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary

by Harryette Mullen
Graywolf Press (Nov 05, 2013)
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"Harryette Mullen is a magician of words, phrases, and songs … No voice in contemporary poetry is quite as original, cosmopolitan, witty, and tragic."

—Susan Stewart, citation for the Academy of American Poets Fellowship

Urban tumbleweed, some people call it,
discarded plastic bag we see in every city
blown down the street with vagrant wind.

—from Urban Tumbleweed

Urban Tumbleweed is the poet Harryette Mullen’s exploration of spaces where the city and the natural world collide. Written out of a daily practice of walking, Mullen’s stanzas adapt the traditional Japanese tanka, a poetic form suited for recording fleeting impressions, describing environmental transitions, and contemplating the human being’s place in the natural world. But, as she writes in her preface, "What is natural about being human? What to make of a city dweller taking a ’nature walk’ in a public park while listening to a podcast with ear-bud headphones?"


Click for more detail about Percival Everett By Virgil Russell: A Novel by Percival Everett Percival Everett By Virgil Russell: A Novel

by Percival Everett
Graywolf Press (Feb 05, 2013)
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"Anything we take for granted, Mr. Everett means to show us, may turn out to be a lie." —Wall Street Journal
* Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * Finalist for the PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction *
A story inside a story inside a story. A man visits his aging father in a nursing home, where his father writes the novel he imagines his son would write. Or is it the novel that the son imagines his father would imagine, if he were to imagine the kind of novel the son would write?
Let’s simplify: a woman seeks an apprenticeship with a painter, claiming to be his long-lost daughter. A contractor-for-hire named Murphy can’t distinguish between the two brothers who employ him. And in Murphy’s troubled dreams, Nat Turner imagines the life of William Styron. These narratives twist together with anecdotes from the nursing home, each building on the other until they crest in a wild, outlandish excursion of the inmates led by the father. Anchoring these shifting plotlines is a running commentary between father and son that sheds doubt on the truthfulness of each story. Because, after all, what narrator can we ever trust?
Not only is Percival Everett by Virgil Russell a powerful, compassionate meditation on old age and its humiliations, it is an ingenious culmination of Everett’s recurring preoccupations. All of his prior work, his metaphysical and philosophical inquiries, his investigations into the nature of narrative, have led to this masterful book. Percival Everett has never been more cunning, more brilliant and subversive, than he is in this, his most important and elusive novel to date.


Click for more detail about One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir by Binyavanga Wainaina One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir

by Binyavanga Wainaina
Graywolf Press (Sep 04, 2012)
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“A Kenyan Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man… suffused by a love affair with language.”—Publishers Weekly, Top Ten Books of 2011

In this vivid and compelling memoir, Binyavanga Wainaina tumbles through his middle-class Kenyan childhood out of kilter with the world around him. In One Day I Will Write About This Place, named a 2011 New York Times notable book, Wainaina brilliantly evokes family, tribe, and nationhood in joyous, ecstatic language.


Click for more detail about The Grey Album: On The Blackness Of Blackness by Kevin Young The Grey Album: On The Blackness Of Blackness

by Kevin Young
Graywolf Press (Mar 13, 2012)
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Selected as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012 by the New York Times

*Finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism**A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Literary Criticism and Essays Pick for Spring 2012*The Grey Album, the first work of prose by the brilliant poet Kevin Young, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction PrizeTaking its title from Danger Mouse’s pioneering mashup of Jay-Z’s The Black Album and the Beatles’ The White Album, Kevin Young’s encyclopedic book combines essay, cultural criticism, and lyrical choruses to illustrate the African American tradition of lying—storytelling, telling tales, fibbing, improvising, "jazzing." What emerges is a persuasive argument for the many ways that African American culture is American culture, and for the centrality of art—and artfulness—to our daily life. Moving from gospel to soul, funk to freestyle, Young sifts through the shadows, the bootleg, the remix, the grey areas of our history, literature, and music.


Click for more detail about Assumption: A Novel by Percival Everett Assumption: A Novel

by Percival Everett
Graywolf Press (Oct 25, 2011)
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A baffling triptych of murder mysteries by the author of I Am Not Sidney Poitier

Ogden Walker, deputy sheriff of a small New Mexico town, is on the trail of an old woman’s murderer. But at the crime scene, his are the only footprints leading up to and away from her door. Something is amiss, and even his mother knows it. As other cases pile up, Ogden gives chase, pursuing flimsy leads for even flimsier reasons. His hunt leads him from the seamier side of Denver to a hippie commune as he seeks the puzzling solution. In Assumption, his follow-up to the wickedly funny I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett is in top form as he once again upends our expectations about characters, plot, race, and meaning. A wild ride to the heart of a baffling mystery, Assumption is a literary thriller like no other.


Click for more detail about Erasure by Percival Everett Erasure

by Percival Everett
Graywolf Press (Oct 25, 2011)
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Erasure by Percival Everett is the first great manifesto for literature by African Americans in the 21st century ▶


Percival Everett’s blistering satire about race and writing, available again in paperback.

Thelonious Monk Ellison’s writing career is in a slump: despite critical acclaim for his previous works, his newest manuscript has been turned down by seventeen publishers. This rejection is all the more painful as he watches the soaring success of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a debut novel by a writer whose only connection to Harlem is a brief visit to some relatives. Concurrently, Monk confronts real-life family crises: his elderly mother is rapidly deteriorating due to Alzheimer’s, and the echo of his father’s suicide seven years earlier still haunts him.

In a mix of frustration and desolation, Monk hastily writes a book intended as a rebuke to Juanita Mae Jenkins’s bestselling work. Though Monk never intended for My Pafology to be published—much less taken seriously—it is, under the pen name Stagg R. Leigh. To his shock, it becomes a literary sensation. The narrative then focuses on how Monk navigates the unexpected repercussions, both personal and professional, of his unintentional success, making this novel both uproariously funny and profoundly poignant.


Click for more detail about One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir by Binyavanga Wainaina One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir

by Binyavanga Wainaina
Graywolf Press (Jul 19, 2011)
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*A New York Times Notable Book*
*A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice*
*A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year*Binyavanga Wainaina tumbled through his middle-class Kenyan childhood out of kilter with the world around him. This world came to him as a chaos of loud and colorful sounds: the hair dryers at his mother’s beauty parlor, black mamba bicycle bells, mechanics in Nairobi, the music of Michael Jackson?all punctuated by the infectious laughter of his brother and sister, Jimmy and Ciru. He could fall in with their patterns, but it would take him a while to carve out his own. In this vivid and compelling debut memoir, Wainaina takes us through his school days, his mother’s religious period, his failed attempt to study in South Africa as a computer programmer, a moving family reunion in Uganda, and his travels around Kenya. The landscape in front of him always claims his main attention, but he also evokes the shifting political scene that unsettles his views on family, tribe, and nationhood. Throughout, reading is his refuge and his solace. And when, in 2002, a writing prize comes through, the door is opened for him to pursue the career that perhaps had been beckoning all along. A series of fascinating international reporting assignments follow. Finally he circles back to a Kenya in the throes of postelection violence and finds he is not the only one questioning the old certainties. Resolutely avoiding stereotype and cliché, Wainaina paints every scene in One Day I Will Write About This Place with a highly distinctive and hugely memorable brush.


Click for more detail about Life On Mars: Poems by Tracy K. Smith Life On Mars: Poems

by Tracy K. Smith
Graywolf Press (May 10, 2011)
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A 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Nominated Book

Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize* A New York Times Notable Book of 2011 and New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice *
* A New Yorker, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year *New poetry by the award-winning poet Tracy K. Smith, whose "lyric brilliance and political impulses never falter" (Publishers Weekly, starred review)You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself
To lift you past the rungs of your crib. What
Would your life say if it could talk?
—from "No Fly Zone"


With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation.


Click for more detail about Crave Radiance: New And Selected Poems 1990-2010 by Elizabeth Alexander Crave Radiance: New And Selected Poems 1990-2010

by Elizabeth Alexander
Graywolf Press (Sep 28, 2010)
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The first career retrospective by the award-winning poet Elizabeth Alexander, including her poem delivered at Barack Obama’s presidential inaugurationWe crave radiance in this austere world,
light in the spiritual darkness.
Learning is the one perfect religion,
its path correct, narrow, certain, straight.
—from "Allegiance"


Over twenty years, Elizabeth Alexander has become one of America’s most exciting and important poets, and her selection as the inaugural poet by President Obama confirmed her place as one of the indispensable voices of our time. Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010 gathers twenty pages of new poetry, along with generous selections from her previous work. The result is the definitive volume to date by this American master.


Click for more detail about Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems by Thomas Sayers Ellis Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems

by Thomas Sayers Ellis
Graywolf Press (Aug 31, 2010)
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The ambitious, combative, and spot-on new poetry book by Thomas Sayers Ellis, author of the award-winning The Maverick Room

Naturally, this will scare
the civil rights out of some
and, for a mad-moment, empower
a great many wrong-cultured others.
—from "The Return of Colored Only"

Skin, Inc. is Thomas Sayers Ellis’s big, ambitious argument in sound and image for an America whose identity is in need of repair. In lyric sequences and with his own photographs, Ellis traverses the African American and American literary landscapes—along the way adding race fearlessness to past and present literary styles and themes, and perform-a-forming tributes for the Godfather of Soul, James Brown; the King of Pop, Michael Jackson; and the election of President Barack Obama. Part manifesto, part identity repair kit, part plea for poetic wholeness, this collection worries and self-defends, eulogizes and casts a vote, raises a fist and, often, an intimidating song. One sequence is written as a sonic/ visual diagram of pronouns and vowels; another quotes from editors’ rejections of his own poetry included in the book; another poem, "Race Change Operation," begins: "When I awake I will be white, the color of law." Skin, Inc. is the latest work by one of the most audacious and provocative poets now writing.


Click for more detail about How To Escape From A Leper Colony: A Novella And Stories by Tiphanie Yanique How To Escape From A Leper Colony: A Novella And Stories

by Tiphanie Yanique
Graywolf Press (Mar 02, 2010)
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An enthralling debut collection from a singular Caribbean voice

For a leper, many things are impossible, and many other things are easily done. Babalao Chuck said he could fly to the other side of the island and peek at the nuns bathing. And when a man with no hands claims that he can fly, you listen. The inhabitants of an island walk into the sea. A man passes a jail cell’s window, shouldering a wooden cross. And in the international shop of coffins, a story repeats itself, pointing toward an inevitable tragedy. If the facts of these stories are sometimes fantastical, the situations they describe are complex and all too real.

Lyrical, lush, and haunting, the prose shimmers in this nuanced debut, set mostly in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Part oral history, part postcolonial narrative, How to Escape from a Leper Colony is ultimately a loving portrait of a wholly unique place. Like Gabriel García Márquez, Edwidge Danticat, and Maryse Condé before her, Tiphanie Yanique has crafted a book that is heartbreaking, hilarious, magical, and mesmerizing. An unforgettable collection.


Click for more detail about I Am Not Sidney Poitier: A Novel by Percival Everett I Am Not Sidney Poitier: A Novel

by Percival Everett
Graywolf Press (May 26, 2009)
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I Am Not Sidney Poitier is an irresistible comic novel from the master storyteller Percival Everett, and an irreverent take on race, class, and identity in America


I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk-taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in the world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.

Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor, and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation.
Percival Everett’s hilarious new novel follows Not Sidney’s tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less-than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not gets arrested in rural Georgia for driving while black, sparks a dinnertable explosion at the home of his manipulative girlfriend, and sleuths a murder case in Smut Eye, Alabama, all while navigating the recurrent communication problem: "What’s your name?" a kid would ask. "Not Sidney," I would say. "Okay, then what is it?"


Click for more detail about Holding Pattern: Stories by Jeffery Renard Allen Holding Pattern: Stories

by Jeffery Renard Allen
Graywolf Press (Sep 02, 2008)
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The world of Jeffery Renard Allen’s stunning short-story collection is a place like no other. A recognizable city, certainly, but one in which a man might sprout wings or copper pennies might fall from the skies onto your head. Yet these are no fairy tales. The hostility, the hurt, is all too human.

The protagonists circle each other with steely determination: a grandson taunts his grandmother, determined to expose her secret past; for years, a sister tries to keep a menacing neighbor away from her brother; and in the local police station, an officer and prisoner try to break each other’s resolve.

In all the stories, Allen calibrates the mounting tension with exquisite timing, in mesmerizing prose that has won him comparisons with Joyce and Faulkner. Holding Pattern is a captivating collection by a prodigiously talented writer.


Click for more detail about Duende: Poems by Tracy K. Smith Duende: Poems

by Tracy K. Smith
Graywolf Press (May 29, 2007)
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Winner 2008 Essence Literary Award for Poetry (AALBC.com was on the selection committee)

Every poem is the story of itself.

Pure conflict. Its own undoing.

Breeze of dreams, then certain death.

—from "History"

Duende, that dark and elusive force described by Federico García Lorca, is the creative and ecstatic power an artist seeks to channel from within. It can lead the artist toward revelation, but it must also, Lorca says, accept and even serenade the possibility of death. Tracy K. Smith’s bold second poetry collection explores history and the intersections of folk traditions, political resistance, and personal survival. Duende gives passionate testament to suppressed cultures, and allows them to sing.


Click for more detail about Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*perm**k*t, and Muse & Drudge by Harryette Mullen Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*perm**k*t, and Muse & Drudge

by Harryette Mullen
Graywolf Press (Oct 31, 2006)
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Three important poetry collections brought together under one cover by Harryette Mullen, author of Sleeping with the Dictionary.

if you turned down the media
so I could write a book
then you could look me up
in your voluminous recyclopedia

-from Muse & Drudge

Recyclopedia shows the extraordinary development of Harryette Mullen’s career, in her books Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge, all originally published in the 1990s and now available again to new readers. These prose poems and lyrics bring us into collision with the language of fashion and femininity, advertising and the supermarket, the blues and traditional lyric poetry. Recyclopedia is a major gathering of work by one of the most exciting and innovative poets writing in America today.


Click for more detail about Sweet And Sour Milk (Variations On The Theme Of An African Dictatorship) by Nuruddin Farah Sweet And Sour Milk (Variations On The Theme Of An African Dictatorship)

by Nuruddin Farah
Graywolf Press (Aug 22, 2006)
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Winner of the 1980 English-Speaking Union Literary AwardThe first novel in Farah’s universally acclaimed Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship trilogy, Sweet and Sour Milk chronicles one man’s search for the reasons behind his twin brother’s violent death during the 1970s. The atmosphere of political tyranny and repression reduces our hero’s quest to a passive and fatalistic level; his search for reasons and answers ultimately becomes a search for meaning. The often detective-story-like narrative of this novel thus moves on a primarily interior plane as "Farah takes us deep into territory he has charted and mapped and made uniquely his own" (Chinua Achebe).


Click for more detail about Sardines: A Novel (Variations On The Theme Of An African Dictatorship) by Nuruddin Farah Sardines: A Novel (Variations On The Theme Of An African Dictatorship)

by Nuruddin Farah
Graywolf Press (Aug 22, 2006)
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Winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature

Farah’s landmark Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship trilogy is comprised by the novels Sweet and Sour Milk, Sardines, and Close Sesame. In this volume, the second of the three, a woman loses her job as editor of the national newspaper and then finds her efforts to instill her daughter with a sense of dignity and independence threatened by an oppressive government and the traditions of conservative Islam.

Sardines brilliantly combines a social commentary on life under a dictatorship with a compassionate exploration of African feminist issues.


Click for more detail about Close Sesame: A Novel (Variations On The Theme Of An African Dictatorship) by Nuruddin Farah Close Sesame: A Novel (Variations On The Theme Of An African Dictatorship)

by Nuruddin Farah
Graywolf Press (Aug 22, 2006)
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Farah’s landmarkVariations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship trilogy is comprised by the novels Sweet and Sour Milk, Sardines, and Close Sesame. In this volume, the third and final book in the series, the characters are deeply entwined in the waking nightmare of a police state. An old man finds himself poised in mortal combat with an elusive and cunning enemy in an atmosphere where the distinction between public and private justice is always obscured.

Close Sesame is a novel that offers "an eloquent indictment of the tyrannies committed both under Islamic law and in the name of Socialism" (The Observer).


Click for more detail about American Sublime: Poems by Elizabeth Alexander American Sublime: Poems

by Elizabeth Alexander
Graywolf Press (Oct 01, 2005)
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A brilliant new collection by Elizabeth Alexander, whose "poems bristle with the irresistible quality of a world seen fresh" (Rita Dove, The Washington Post)
Too many people have seen too much

and lived to tell, or not tell, or tell

with their silent, patterned bodies,

their glass eyes, gone legs, flower-printed flesh …

-from "Notes From"
In her fourth remarkable collection, Elizabeth Alexander voices the outcries, dreams, and histories of an African American tradition that goes back to the slave rebellion on the Amistad and to the artists’ canvases of nineteenth-century America. In persona poems, historical narratives, jazz riffs, sonnets, elegies, and a sequence of ars poetica, American Sublime is Alexander’s most vivid and varied collection and affirms her place as one of America’s most lively and gifted writers.
"Alexander is an unusual thing, a sensualist of history, a romanticist of race. She weaves biography, history, experience, pop culture and dream. Her poems make the public and private dance together." —Chicago Tribune


Click for more detail about The Maverick Room: Poems by Thomas Sayers Ellis The Maverick Room: Poems

by Thomas Sayers Ellis
Graywolf Press (Jan 01, 2005)
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With its defiance for any one tradition or voice, Thomas Sayers Ellis’s debut becomes a powerful argument against monotony

A dream. A democracy. A savage liberty.
And yet another anthem and yet another heaven
and yet another party wants you.
Wants you wants you wants you.

—from “Groovallegiance”


In one poem, Thomas Sayers Ellis prognosticates, “Pretty soon, the Age of the Talk Show / Will slip on a peel left in the avant- gutter.” The result is The Maverick Room, the testing ground of determination and serendipity, where call-and-response becomes Steinian echo becomes Post-Soul percussive pleasure becomes a bootlegged recording hustled out of a D.C. go-go club.


Click for more detail about Damned If I Do: Stories by Percival Everett Damned If I Do: Stories

by Percival Everett
Graywolf Press (Nov 01, 2004)
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Damned If I Do is an exceptional new collection of short stories by Percival Everett, author of the highly praised and wickedly funny novel ErasurePeople are just naturally hopeful, a term my grandfather used to tell me was more than occasionally interchangeable with stupid.A cop, a cowboy, several fly fishermen, and a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories. An old man ends up in a high-speed car chase with the cops after stealing the car that blocks the garbage bin at his apartment building. A stranger gets a job at a sandwich shop and fixes everything in sight: a manual mustard dispenser, a mouthful of crooked teeth, thirty-two parking tickets, and a sexual-identity problem.Percival Everett is a master storyteller who ingeniously addresses issues of race and prejudice by simultaneously satirizing and celebrating the human condition.


Click for more detail about Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

by Claudia Rankine
Graywolf Press (Sep 01, 2004)
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In this powerful sequence of TV images and essay, Claudia Rankine explores the personal and political unrest of our volatile new century
I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes

me the saddest. The sadness is not really about

George W. or our American optimism; the

sadness lives in the recognition that a life can

not matter.
The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric, the essay, and the visual in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity-of thought, imagination, and sentence-making-while arguing that recognition of others is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and our government.
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is an important new confrontation with our culture, with a voice at its heart bewildered by its inadequacy in the face of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won’t leave us alone.


Click for more detail about Coin Of The Realm: Essays On The Life And Art Of Poetry by Carl Phillips Coin Of The Realm: Essays On The Life And Art Of Poetry

by Carl Phillips
Graywolf Press (Jun 01, 2004)
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The Award-winning poet Carl Phillips grapples with issues of authority, identity, and beauty in these sensual and deeply intelligent essays
The "coin of the realm" is, classically, the currency that for any culture most holds value. In art, as in life, the poet Carl Phillips argues, that currency includes beauty, risk, and authority-values of meaning and complexity that all too often go disregarded. Together, these essays become an invaluable statement for the necessary-and necessarily difficult-work of the imagination and the will, even when, as Phillips states in his title essay, "the last thing that most human beings seem capable of trusting naturally-instinctively-is themselves, their own judgment."


Click for more detail about The Venus Hottentot: Poems by Elizabeth Alexander The Venus Hottentot: Poems

by Elizabeth Alexander
Graywolf Press (Jan 01, 2004)
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Elizabeth Alexander’s highly praised first collection is available once again

I didn’t want to write a poem that said "blackness
is," because we know better than anyone
that we are not one or ten or ten thousand things
Not one poem
-from "Today’s News"

Originally published in 1990 to widespread acclaim, The Venus Hottentot introduces Elizabeth Alexander’s vital poetic voice, distinguished even in this remarkable first book by its examination of history, gender, and race with an uncommon clarity and music. These poems range from personal memory to cultural history to human personae: John Coltrane, Frida Kahlo, Nelson Mandela, and "The Venus Hottentot," a nineteenth-century African woman who was made into a carnival sideshow exhibit.

In language as vibrant within traditional forms as it is within improvisational lyrics, the poems in The Venus Hottentot demonstrate why Alexander is among our most dazzling and important contemporary poets and cultural critics.

"Alexander creates intellectual magic in poem after poem."
—The New York Times Book Review


Click for more detail about The Black Interior: Essays by Elizabeth Alexander The Black Interior: Essays

by Elizabeth Alexander
Graywolf Press (Jan 01, 2004)
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With a poet’s precision and an intellectually adventurous spirit, Elizabeth Alexander explores a wide spectrum of contemporary African American artistic life through literature, paintings, popular media, and films, and discusses its place in current culture. In The Black Interior, she examines the vital roles of such heavyweight literary figures as Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and Rita Dove, as well as lesser known, yet vibrant, new creative voices. She offers a reconsideration of "afro-outré" painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, the concept of "race-pride" in Jet magazine, and her take on Denzel Washington’s career as a complex black male icon in a post-affirmative action era. Also available is Alexander’s much heralded essay on Rodney King, Emmett Till, and the collective memory of racial violence.

Alexander, who has been a professor at the University of Chicago and Smith College, and recently at Yale University, has taught and lectured on African American art and culture across the country and abroad for nearly two decades. In The Black Interior, she directs her scrupulous poet’s eye to the urgent cultural issues of the day. This lively collection is a crucial volume for understanding current thinking on race, art, and culture in America.


Click for more detail about The Body’s Question: Poems by Tracy K. Smith The Body’s Question: Poems

by Tracy K. Smith
Graywolf Press (Oct 01, 2003)
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The Body’s Question debuts Tracy K. Smith’s ambitious and engaging new voice

You are pure appetite. I am pure
Appetite. You are a phantom
In that far-off city where daylight
Climbs cathedral walls, stone by stolen stone.
from “Self-Portrait as the Letter Y”

The Body’s Question received the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African-American poet, selected by Kevin Young. Confronting loss, historical intersections with race and family, and the threshold between childhood and adulthood, Smith gathers courage and direction from the many disparate selves encountered in these poems, until, as she writes, “I was anyone I wanted to be.”


Click for more detail about Bellocq’s Ophelia: Poems by Natasha Trethewey Bellocq’s Ophelia: Poems

by Natasha Trethewey
Graywolf Press (Apr 01, 2002)
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Selected as a "2003 Notable Book" by the American Library Association
In the early 1900s, E.J. Bellocq photographed prostitutes in the red-light district of New Orleans. His remarkable, candid photos inspired Natasha Trethewey to imagine the life of Ophelia, the subject of Bellocq’s Ophelia, her stunning second collection of poems. With elegant precision, Ophelia tells of her life on display: her white father whose approval she earns by standing very still; the brothel Madame who tells her to act like a statue while the gentlemen callers choose; and finally the camera, which not only captures her body, but also offers a glimpse into her soul.


Click for more detail about Cortã¨Ge: Poems by Carl Phillips Cortã¨Ge: Poems

by Carl Phillips
Graywolf Press (Mar 25, 2002)
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poetry by author of IN THE BLOOD


Click for more detail about From The Devotions: Poems by Carl Phillips From The Devotions: Poems

by Carl Phillips
Graywolf Press (Mar 02, 2002)
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With From the Devotions, Carl Phillips takes us even further into that dangerous space he has already made his own, where body and soul—ever restless—come explosively together. Speaking to a balance between decorum and pain, he offers here a devotional poetry that argues for faith, even without the comforting gods or the organized structures of revealed truth. Neither sage nor saint nor prophet, the poet is the listener, the mourner, the one who has some access to the maddening quarters of human consciousness, the wry Sibyl. From the Devotions is deeply felt, highly intelligent, and unsentimental, and cements Phillips’s reputation as a poet of enormous talent and depth.


Click for more detail about Pastoral: Poems by Carl Phillips Pastoral: Poems

by Carl Phillips
Graywolf Press (Mar 02, 2002)
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In his newest book, National Book Award finalist Carl Phillips creates a shadowy inner landscape where the field is the heart, and the heart itself has a beautifully, often treacherously flawed darkness that each of us seeks to penetrate, believing in the possibility of light. Examining how to fill and fulfill the life granted us—how to realize the self entirely, and in time—these rhythmically sequenced meditations circle the predicaments of our longing against the backdrop of pastoral tradition. How do we balance control and abandonment when making poetry, as well as in making a life with another person? How do we reconcile fleshly desire and spiritual intention? Tightly coherent, emotionally nuanced, Pastoral both enlarges and defines Phillips’s already impressive poetic territory.


Click for more detail about Antebellum Dream Book by Elizabeth Alexander Antebellum Dream Book

by Elizabeth Alexander
Graywolf Press (Sep 01, 2001)
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In surprising turns through different American cities, mindsets, and eras, and through the strange rhythms of dreaming, the celebrated poet Elizabeth Alexander composes her own kind of improvisational jazz. Antebellum Dream Book offers a music of resistances as well as soaring flights of fancy: the conflicts of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and after; a mother’s struggle to see through a postpartum fog; a vision in which the poet takes on the narrative voice of Muhammad Ali. The New York Times Book Review has said that "Alexander creates intellectual magic in poem after poem." In this stunning collection, she furthers her reputation as a vital and vivid poetic voice keenly attuned to our ideas of race, gender, politics, and motherhood.


Click for more detail about Domestic Work: Poems by Natasha Trethewey Domestic Work: Poems

by Natasha Trethewey
Graywolf Press (Aug 01, 2000)
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In this debut collection, Natasha Trethewey draws moving domestic portraits of families, past and present, caught in the act of earning a living and managing their households. Small moments taken from a labor-filled day reveal the equally hard emotional work of memory and forgetting, the extraordinary difficulty of trying to live with or without someone.


Click for more detail about Take Three: Agni New Poets Series:  1 (Vol 1) by Thomas Sayers Ellis, Larissa Szporluk, and Joe Osterhaus Take Three: Agni New Poets Series: 1 (Vol 1)

by Thomas Sayers Ellis, Larissa Szporluk, and Joe Osterhaus
Graywolf Press (Feb 01, 1996)
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Take Three PoetsTake Thomas Sayers Ellis: Ellis’s fractured syntax, his spasmodic, staccato utterance suggest a defiant sensibility. Indeed, at the center of Ellis’s work is the figure of an aggressive father, taunting his son into song. Thomas Sayers Ellis was a founding member of Boston’s Dark Room Collective and coeditor of AGNI’s successful poetry anthology, On the VergeTake Larissa Szporluk: This poet stalks a landscape that is humid, stylized, Southern. The poet Gregory Orr says of her work: "Faced with such rending beauty, such ravished lucidity, all we can do is stand back and gaze with gratitude and awe." Larissa Szporluk studied at the Iows Writers’ Workshop, has taught at Bowling Green State University, and now resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Take Joe Osterhaus: Unabashedly intellectual and demanding, Osterhaus’s verse displays a rare elegance. According to David St. John, "these precise meditations are dazzling for their ability to touch the seemingly ordinary moments of a life and find in them the materials of both miracle and change." Joe Osterhaus has published in such places as the Antioch Review, the Boston Review, and the Nebraska Review, and he currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Edited by Askold Melnyczuk and the poetry panel of AGNI magazine, Take Three is the first in an important annual series designed to launch the work of new poets.


Click for more detail about Ten Seconds by Louis Edwards Ten Seconds

by Louis Edwards
Graywolf Press (May 01, 1991)
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The narrator, a Black oil refinery worker in Louisiana, looks back on his life and the people and events that have shaped it.