When I Waked, I Cried To Dream Again (eBook)

Poems

A. Van Jordan (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023
144 Seiten
W. W. Norton & Company (Verlag)
978-1-324-05094-0 (ISBN)

Infos

Winner of the 2024 Hurston/Wright Legacy AwardA. Van Jordan is one of the most capacious, deep-structural imaginations in American poetry today. Linda GregersonA dynamic, moving hybrid work that celebrates Black youth, often too fleeting, and examines Black lives lost to police violence.In this astonishing volume of poems and lyric prose, Whiting Awardwinner A. Van Jordan draws comparisons to Black characters in Shakespearean playsCaliban and Sycorax fromThe Tempest, Aaron the Moor fromTitus Andronicus, and the eponymous antihero of Othelloto mourn the deaths of Black people, particularly Black children, at the hands of police officers. What do these characters, and the ways they are defined by the white figures who surround them, have in common with Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and other Black people killed in the twenty-first century?Balancing anger and grief with celebration, Jordan employs an elastic variety of poetic forms, including ekphrastic sestinas inspired by the photography of Malick Sidib, fictional dialogues, and his signature definition poems that break down the insidious power of words like fair, suspect, and juvenile. He invents a new form of window poems, based on a characterization exercise, to see Shakespeares Black characters in three dimensions, and finds contemporary parallels in the way these characters are othered, rendered at once undesirable and hypersexualized, a threat and a joke.At once a stunning inquiry into the roots of racist violence and a moving recognition of the joy of Black youth before the world takes hold, When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again expresses the preciousness and precarity of life.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 6.6.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Lyrik / Dramatik ► Lyrik / Gedichte
• Schlagworte: african american poetry • Black literary criticism • black literary history • black poetry • Black Youth • Culture • Desire • Emotion • longing • Poetry • police violence • Race • Shakespeare
• ISBN-10: 1-324-05094-2 / 1324050942
• ISBN-13: 978-1-324-05094-0 / 9781324050940