Faster Than Light : New and Selected Poems, 1996-2011.
Title:
Faster Than Light : New and Selected Poems, 1996-2011.
Author:
Nelson, Marilyn.
ISBN:
9780807147351
Personal Author:
Edition:
1st ed.
Physical Description:
1 online resource (172 pages)
Contents:
Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- I. LYRIC HISTORIES -- A Wreath for Emmett Till -- From The Freedom Business -- Witness -- Pestilence -- A Voyage by Sea -- Keeper of the Keys -- Fat on the Fire -- Meg -- Cows in the Shade -- Sap Rising -- Farm Garden -- The Freedom Business -- From Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem -- On Abrigador Hill -- Dinah's Lament -- Not My Bones -- From Seneca Village -- Sky-Land -- Conductor -- The Cotillion -- Address -- Thompson and Seaman Vows, African Union Church -- Words and Whispers -- Little Box -- Miracle in the Collection Plate -- Sisters of Charity -- Uncle Epiphany -- From Miss Crandall's School for Young Ladies & Little Misses of Color -- The Book -- Family -- The Tao of the Trial -- Miss Ann Eliza Hammond -- Etymology -- Albert Hinkley -- Worth -- From Carver: A Life in Poems -- Watkins Laundry and Apothecary -- Old Settlers' Reunion -- Four A.M. in the Woods -- Cafeteria Food -- Called -- My People -- Chemistry 101 -- From an Alabama Farmer -- Bedside Reading -- Poultry Husbandry -- 1905 -- Veil-Raisers -- How a Dream Dies -- The Dimensions of the Milky Way -- Ruellia Noctiflora -- Goliath -- House Ways and Means -- "God's Little Workshop" -- Eureka -- Mineralogy -- Last Talk with Jim Hardwick -- Moton Field -- From Sweethearts of Rhythm -- Bugle Call Rag -- Chattanooga Choo-Choo -- Jump, Jump, Jump -- She's Crazy with the Heat -- Red-Hot Mama -- That Man of Mine -- Improvisation, 1948 -- Drum Solo, 1950 -- The Song is You -- II. OTHER SELECTED POEMS -- From The Cachoeira Tales and Other Poems: Faster Than Light -- Cachoeira Tales -- Triolets for Triolet -- III. NEW AND UNCOLLECTED POEMS -- Millie-Christine -- A Small Good News -- Little Dialogue with the Muse -- First Alzheimer's Sonnet -- Second Alzheimer's Sonnet -- The Truceless Wars.
Live Jazz, Franklin Park Zoo -- To the Confederate Dead -- Bivouac in a Storm -- Six-Minute Dogfight -- Written in Clouds -- Honor Guard -- Eternal Optimist -- Psalm for Another People -- Nine Times Nine, on Awe -- In the Waiting Room -- The Mohembo Road -- For the Feast of Corpus Christi -- How to Be Human Now -- From "Adventure-Monk!".
Abstract:
Conjuring numerous voices and characters across oceans and centuries, Faster Than Light explores widely disparate experiences through the lens of traditional poetic forms. This volume contains a selection of Marilyn Nelson's new and uncollected poems as well as work from each of her lyric histories of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century African American individuals and communities.Poems include the stories of historical figures like Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old boy lynched in 1955, and the inhabitants of Seneca Village, an African American community razed in 1857 for the creation of Central Park. "Bivouac in a Storm" tells the story of a group of young soldiers, later known as the Tuskegee Airmen, as they trained near Biloxi, Mississippi, "marching in summer heat / thick as blackstrap molasses, under trees / haunted by whippings." Later pieces range from the poet's travels in Africa, Europe, and Polynesia, to poems written in collaboration with Father Jacques de Foiard Brown, a former Benedictine monk and the subject of Nelson's playful fictional fantasy sequence, "Adventure-Monk!" Both personal and historical, these poems remain grounded in everyday details but reach toward spiritual and moral truths.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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