the new black
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (2012)
Smart, grounded, and lyrical, Evie Shockley’s the new black integrates powerful ideas about “blackness,” past and present, through the medium of beautifully crafted verse. the new black sees our racial past inevitably shaping our contemporary moment, but struggles to remember and reckon with the impact of generational shifts: what seemed impossible to people not many years ago—for example, the election of an African American president—will have always been a part of the world of children born in the new millennium. All of the poems here, whether sonnet, mesostic, or deconstructed blues, exhibit a formal flair. They speak to the changes we have experienced as a society in the last few decades—changes that often challenge our past strategies for resisting racism and, for African Americans, ways of relating to one another. The poems embrace a formal ambiguity that echoes the uncertainty these shifts produce, while reveling in language play that enables readers to “laugh to keep from crying.” They move through nostalgia, even as they insist on being alive to the present and point longingly towards possible futures. Check for the online reader’s companion at http://http://thenewblack.site.wesleyan.edu.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shockley's second book, which follows 2006's a half-red sea, uses an energetic mix of forms to channel a variety of poets' auras from Lucille Clifton and nikki giovanni to Jayne Cortez and John Cage in attempting to deliver the title effect. Shockley does deliver winning mesostics, Olsonian open-fieldings, verse epistles, and elliptical fragmentary stanzas as she ranges over relatively conventional first-person memories ("i was waiting on a poem when/ my grandfather pushed through the screen door"), a sad "cinder ella" tale of being carded ("her man's kiss did not revive her"), and the terse imagism of poems like "dear ink jet": "black fast. greasy lightning./ won't smear. won't rub off." Despite the title's unifying gesture, however, and Shockley's clear mastery of the history of 20th-century poetry, African-American and otherwise, the collection feels more like a grab-baggy first book than a synthetic second. An "ode to my blackness" ("you are the tunnel john henry died to carve") is preceded by '70s-style political sermonizing ("if/ i had/ a dollar for// every/ drop of/ iraqi blood spilled,// every/ woman raped,/ every life destroyed// in this war,/ i'd be/ halliburton."), before both give way to a poem about losing one's virginity while listening to Prince. A lot of The New Black feels familiar in a good way.
