Roll Deep
Poems
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A whimsical and “devastatingly effective” (Washington Post) collection that captures the spirit of travel and pays homage to heritage.
In his fourth collection, a breakthrough volume, Major Jackson appropriates the vernacular notion of “rolling deep” to capture the spirit of aesthetic travel that defines these forceful new poems and brazenly announces his steady accretion of literary and artistic influences, both formal and experimental—his “crew.” The confident and radiant poems in Roll Deep address a range of topics, most prominently human intimacy and war. And like his best work to date, these poems create new experiences with language owed to Jackson’s willingness to once again seek a rhythmic sound that expresses the unique realities of the twenty-first century with humor and understanding. Whether set in Nairobi, Madrid, or Greece, the poems are sensuously evocative and unapologetically with-it, in their effort to build community across borders of language and style.
From Urban Renewal, “The Dadaab Suite”:
I have come to Dadaab like an actor
on a press release, unprepared for the drained faces
of famine-fleeing refugees, my craft’s glamour
dimmed by hundreds of infant graves, children
whose lolling heads’ final drop landed on their mothers’
backs like soft stones. What beauty can I spell in
this swelter of dust?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
If Jackson (Holding Company) has a thesis in his fourth collection, it may be this line from the end of the book: "I would turn off the light/ and run my hands over my classmates' coats/ as if playing tag with their bodies." Throughout, Jackson plays with the concept of "rolling deep" slang for having an entourage, living large, and carrying status. But the speakers in Jackson's poems alone in their crowded rooms inhabit a world and language that is strangely hollow. They travel the world and visit amazing places (Greece, Spain, Brazil, Kenya), but are never quite comfortable. The people and places feel interchangeable and the experiences acutely similar, whether the poem's subject is the richest of millionaires or a poverty-stricken kid who happens to be a chess master. Jackson writes in clear lines with unusual line breaks, recalling the natural speech and city rhythms of Frank O'Hara and Langston Hughes, but with an oddly flat tone. The language never reaches the lushness of the concept a son is "as old as the stars" and a nameless partner in a bed is curled "like a snail/ in my arm's crook." There is a yearning for real human connection here, to literally roll deep in humanity, but it's the emptiness of the coats that lingers.
