Testify - Softcover

Manuel, Douglas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 159709045X ISBN 13: 9781597090452

Publisher: Red Hen Press, 2017

Synopsis

A brave, brilliant debut about the African-American experience in the American Midwest. A contemplation of race, masculinity, religion, and class, Testify in a very personal way confronts some of the most critical issues in today's society.

A book of elegiac ambivalence, Testify’s speaker often finds himself trapped between received binaries: black and white, ghetto and suburban, atheism and Catholicism. In many ways, this work is a Bildungsroman detailing the maturation of a black man raised in the crack-laden 1980s, with hip-hop, jazz, and blues as its soundtrack. Rendered with keen attention to the economic decline of the Midwest due to the departure of the automotive industry, this book portrays the speaker wrestling with his city’s demise, family relationships, interracial love, and notions of black masculinity. Never letting anyone, including the speaker, off the hook, Testify refuses sentimentality and didacticism and dwells in a space of uncertainty, where meaning and identity are messy, complicated, and multivalent.

About this title

About the Author

Douglas Manuel was born in Anderson, Indiana. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University and a MFA from Butler University where he was the Managing Editor of Booth a Journal. He is currently a Middleton and Dornsife Fellow at the University of Southern California where he is pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. He was a recipient of the Chris McCarthy Scholarship for the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and has been Poetry Editor for Gold Line Press as well as was one of the Managing Editors of Ricochet Editions. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rhino, North American Review, ? The Chattahoochee Review, New Orleans Review, Crab Creek Review, Many Mountains Moving, and elsewhere.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Mic Drop

Grandma’s grave remains unmarked. It was me
who was supposed to buy her headstone.

After finding out her plot was still uncrowned,
I promised.
I promised to give dad my truck.
I promised to quit smoking, to say sorry more.

My apologies as bare as the stretch of land above her.
Promised I’d send my brother fifty dollars. Promised

I’d holla at my auntie at least once a month.
In the restlessness night gives,
I saw Mounds State Park,

the pavilion filled with every broken promise
congregating as though this was a church revival.

Mother and father both walking as though their legs
were never lost.
Me at a podium, with a microphone:
I’m sorry. I am so sorry.
My act of contrition
interrupted by voices. My past and future selves loudest

of all. They offer punishments: Lashings? Guillotine?
Electric chair? The noose? Banishment? Stones?

To get out of there I had to become Father Bob,
the holiest man I ever saw in flesh. Mirror to face,

I am him, aquiline nose, crow-claw eyebrows, skin
yellowed around eyes and joints.
We do the magic trick

he always did. He pulls my thumb off, and after a quick smoker’s cough, puts it back.

Edition details

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 159709045X
• ISBN 13: 9781597090452
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 104