Testify

Manuel, Douglas

ISBN 10: 159709045X / ISBN 13: 9781597090452

Published by Red Hen Press, 2017

May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G159709045XI4N00

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 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.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Testify
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: 2017
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket