Dark Legs and Silk Kisses

Dark Legs and Silk Kisses PDF Author: Angela Jackson
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810150010
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
Winner of the Carl Sandburg Award for Poetry Angela Jackson brings her remarkable linguistic and poetic gifts to the articulation of African-American experience. The recurrent motif of the spider, which she presents as both creator and predator, demonstrates her deliberate reshaping of myth in the context of contemporary human experience. Informed by African-American speech and poetic traditions, yet uniquely her own, these poems display Jackson's stylistic grace, her exuberance and vitality of spirit, and her emotional sensitivity and psychological insight.

Dark Legs and Silk Kisses

Dark Legs and Silk Kisses PDF Author: Angela Jackson
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810150010
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 124

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner of the Carl Sandburg Award for Poetry Angela Jackson brings her remarkable linguistic and poetic gifts to the articulation of African-American experience. The recurrent motif of the spider, which she presents as both creator and predator, demonstrates her deliberate reshaping of myth in the context of contemporary human experience. Informed by African-American speech and poetic traditions, yet uniquely her own, these poems display Jackson's stylistic grace, her exuberance and vitality of spirit, and her emotional sensitivity and psychological insight.

Dark Legs and Silk Kisses

Dark Legs and Silk Kisses PDF Author: Angela Jackson
Publisher: TriQuarterly Books
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
Winner of the Carl Sandburg Award for Poetry Angela Jackson brings her remarkable linguistic and poetic gifts to the articulation of African-American experience. The recurrent motif of the spider, which she presents as both creator and predator, demonstrates her deliberate reshaping of myth in the context of contemporary human experience. Informed by African-American speech and poetic traditions, yet uniquely her own, these poems display Jackson's stylistic grace, her exuberance and vitality of spirit, and her emotional sensitivity and psychological insight.

And All These Roads Be Luminous

And All These Roads Be Luminous PDF Author: Angela Jackson
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810150778
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
As Angela Jackson has developed as a poet, her poetry has engaged various artistic perspectives, yet always maintains a characteristic combination of compassion, grace, and daring. Jackson moves with ease from the personal to the historical--filled alternately with wonder, righteous anger, tenderness, and a tangible intensity. Her verse is rich and passionate and brimming with poetic surprises.

A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun

A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun PDF Author: Angela Jackson
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807025046
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
A look back at the cultural and political force of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, in celebration of her hundredth birthday Artist–Rebel–Pioneer Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the great American literary icons of the twentieth century, a protégé of Langston Hughes and mentor to a generation of poets, including Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Elizabeth Alexander. Her poetry took inspiration from the complex portraits of black American life she observed growing up on Chicago’s Southside—a world of kitchenette apartments and vibrant streets. From the desk in her bedroom, as a child she filled countless notebooks with poetry, encouraged by the likes of Hughes and affirmed by Richard Wright, who called her work “raw and real.” Over the next sixty years, Brooks’s poetry served as witness to the stark realities of urban life: the evils of lynching, the murders of Emmett Till and Malcolm X, the revolutionary effects of the civil rights movement, and the burgeoning power of the Black Arts Movement. Critical acclaim and the distinction in 1950 as the first black person ever awarded a Pulitzer Prize helped solidify Brooks as a unique and powerful voice. Now, in A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun, fellow Chicagoan and award-winning writer Angela Jackson delves deep into the rich fabric of Brooks’s work and world. Granted unprecedented access to Brooks’s family, personal papers, and writing community, Jackson traces the literary arc of this artist’s long career and gives context for the world in which Brooks wrote and published her work. It is a powerfully intimate look at a once-in-a-lifetime talent up close, using forty-three of Brooks’s most soul-stirring poems as a guide. From trying to fit in at school (“Forgive and Forget”), to loving her physical self (“To Those of My Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals”), to marriage and motherhood (“Maud Martha”), to young men on her block (“We Real Cool”), to breaking history (“Medgar Evers”), to newfound acceptance from her community and her elevation to a “surprising queenhood” (“The Wall”), Brooks lived life through her work. Jackson deftly unpacks it all for both longtime admirers of Brooks and newcomers curious about her interior life. A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun is a commemoration of a writer who negotiated black womanhood and incomparable brilliance with a changing, restless world—an artistic maverick way ahead of her time.

Mississippi Poets

Mississippi Poets PDF Author: Catharine Savage Brosman
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496829069
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Mississippi has produced outstanding writers in numbers far out of proportion to its population. Their contributions to American literature, including poetry, rank as enormous. Mississippi Poets: A Literary Guide showcases forty-seven poets associated with the state and assesses their work with the aim of appreciating it and its place in today’s culture. In Mississippi, the importance of poetry can no longer be doubted. It partakes, as Faulkner wrote, of the broad aim of all literature: “to uplift man’s heart.” In Mississippi Poets, author Catharine Savage Brosman introduces readers to the poets themselves, stressing their versatility and diversity. She describes their subject matter and forms, their books, and particularly representative or striking poems. Of broad interest and easy to consult, this book is both a source of information and a showcase. It highlights the organic connection between poetry by Mississippians and the indigenous music genres of the region, blues and jazz. No other state has produced such abundant and impressive poetry connected to these essential American forms. Brosman profiles and assesses poets from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Grounds for selection include connections between the poets and the state; the excellence and abundance of their work; its critical reception; and both local and national standing. Natives of Mississippi and others who have resided here draw equal consideration. As C. Liegh McInnis observed, “You do not have to be born in Mississippi to be a Mississippi writer. . . . If what happens in Mississippi has an immediate and definite effect on your work, you are a Mississippi writer.”

The Cambridge History of African American Literature

The Cambridge History of African American Literature PDF Author: Maryemma Graham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521872170
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 861

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Book Description
A major new history of the literary traditions, oral and print, of African-descended peoples in the United States.

More Than Meat and Raiment

More Than Meat and Raiment PDF Author: Angela Jackson
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810144573
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Angela Jackson returns with a poetic collage that draws on imagery from the African American South and the South Side of Chicago, storytelling, the Black Arts Movement, and Hausa folklore. Deftly intertwining narrative and free verse, she expresses the complexities, beauty, and haunts of the multilayered Black voice. Jackson offers a stirring mixture of the music, food, and soul that have come to characterize her lyrical work. The speakers of these poems reflect on memory and saga, history and legend. Voices recall evenings spent catching fireflies with a younger sister, the aroma of homemade rolls, the father who squeezes papers into his wallet alongside bills in order to appear wealthy (“a flock of green birds rustling inside / to get out for some extravagance”). A Black girl watches TV and dreams of the perfect partner. A citizen contends with the unrelenting devastation of police violence in a work reminiscent of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “verse journalism.” A mother loses her daughter only to witness her rebirth: “Praise be / the human being / that is being.” In “For Our People,” an homage to Margaret Walker, Jackson summons the resilience and imagination of African Americans, celebrating “each of us injured or exalted, betrayer or betrayed, muted / and declamatory, all one, each of us all of us, each a private star beloved in the universe.” Lauded as one of American poetry’s most vivid voices, Jackson continues her reign among the country’s foremost wordsmiths. This sublime collection delves deep into the porch stories and folktales that have carried the Black voice through all its histories.

The Second Set, Vol. 2

The Second Set, Vol. 2 PDF Author: Sascha Feinstein
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253210685
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Embracing a wide variety of poems informed by jazz, The Second Set includes statements of poetics by many of the poets anthologized.

It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time

It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time PDF Author: Angela Jackson
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810168170
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
2015 PEN Open Book Award Finalist Angela Jackson’s latest collection of poetry borrows its title from a lyric in Barbara Lewis’s 1963 hit single “Hello Stranger,” recorded at Chess Records in Chicago. Like the song, Jackson’s poems are a melodic ode to the African American experience, informed by both individual lives and community history, from the arrival of the first African slave in Virginia in 1619 to post-Obama America. It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time reflects the maturity of Jackson’s poetic vision. The Great Migration, the American South, and Chicago all serve as signposts, but it is the complexity of individual lives—both her own and those who have gone before, walk beside, and come after—that invigorate this collection. Upon surveying so vast a landscape, Jackson finds that sorrow meets delight, and joy lifts up anger and despair. And for all this time, love is the agent, the wise and just rule and guide.

The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature

The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature PDF Author: William L. Andrews
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198031750
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
A breathtaking achievement, this Concise Companion is a suitable crown to the astonishing production in African American literature and criticism that has swept over American literary studies in the last two decades. It offers an enormous range of writers-from Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass, from Zora Neale Hurston to Ralph Ellison, and from Toni Morrison to August Wilson. It contains entries on major works (including synopses of novels), such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Richard Wright's Native Son, and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. It also incorporates information on literary characters such as Bigger Thomas, Coffin Ed Johnson, Kunta Kinte, Sula Peace, as well as on character types such as Aunt Jemima, Brer Rabbit, John Henry, Stackolee, and the trickster. Icons of black culture are addressed, including vivid details about the lives of Muhammad Ali, John Coltrane, Marcus Garvey, Jackie Robinson, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman. Here, too, are general articles on poetry, fiction, and drama; on autobiography, slave narratives, Sunday School literature, and oratory; as well as on a wide spectrum of related topics. Compact yet thorough, this handy volume gathers works from a vast array of sources--from the black periodical press to women's clubs--making it one of the most substantial guides available on the growing, exciting world of African American literature.