Taboo / Yusef Komunyakaa.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Komunyakaa, Yusef.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Series:

Komunyakaa, Yusef. Wishbone trilogy ; pt. 1.

The wishbone trilogy ; pt. 1

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Black people--Poetry.

Black people.

Genre:

Poetry.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

viii, 132 pages ; 22 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004.

Summary:

With the allusive leaps and improvisational chops of a jazz soloist, Yusef Komunyakaa is our great poet of connectivity -- the secret blood that links slave and master, explorer and native, stranger and brother. In Taboo he examines the roles of blacks in Western history, and how these roles are portrayed in art and literature. In taut, meticulously crafted three-line stanzas, Rubens paints his wife looking longingly at a black servant; Aphra Behn writes Oroonoko "as if she'd rehearsed it/for years in her spleen"; and in Monticello, Thomas Jefferson is "still/at his Neoclassical desk/musing, but we know his mind/is brushing aside abstractions/so his hands can touch flesh." Taboo is the powerful first book in a new trilogy by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work never ceases to challenge and delight his readers.

Contents:

Lingo

Imhotep

Aghribat al-Arab

Henry the Navigator

Other worlds

Bacchanal

Astraea's footnotes

Queen Marie-Therèse & Nabo

Lament & praise song

Sunset in Surinam

Monticello

Unframing a triptych

Captain Amasa Delano's dilemma

Before the windows

Double exposure

King of the octave

The price of blood

The quadroon's masque ball

Antebellum silhouettes

Tobe's blues

Othello's robe

Jeanne Duval's confession

Hagar's daughter

Chiaroscuro

Nude study

Trueblood's blues

Satchmo, USA

Cante jondo

The house

To beauty

Daddy Red

Twilight seduction

Homage to a bellhop

Forgive & live

Séance & shadowplay

Lustration

Lucumi

Oil

At the Red Sea

In line at the bank

Troubling the water

Netherworlds

Lingua franca

The archivist

Desecration

Outside the Blue Nile.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy has dustjacket retained.

ISBN:

0374291489

OCLC:

53896552

Online:

Contributor biographical information

Publisher description