semiautomatic (Wesleyan Poetry Series) - Softcover

Shockley, Evie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0819577448 ISBN 13: 9780819577443

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 2018

Synopsis

Art can't shield our bodies or stabilize the earth's climate, but Evie Shockley's semiautomatic insists that it can feed the spirit and reawaken the imagination. The volume responds primarily to the twenty-first century's inescapable evidence of the terms of black life--not so much new as newly visible. The poems trace a whole web of connections between the kinds of violence that affect people across the racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, national, and linguistic boundaries that do and do not divide us. How do we protect our humanity, our ability to feel deeply and think freely, in the face of a seemingly endless onslaught of physical, social, and environmental abuses? Where do we find language to describe, process, and check the attacks and injuries we see and suffer? What actions can break us out of the soul-numbing cycle of emotions, moving through outrage, mourning, and despair, again and again? In poems that span fragment to narrative and quiz to constraint, from procedure to prose and sequence to song, semiautomatic culls past and present for guides to a hoped-for future.

About this title

Review:

"Evie Shockley burns up the page with her new collection.... semiautomatic is a 21st century survival guide, fierce and full of compassion."--Diana Whitney, San Francisco Chronicle

"[N]otable not only for the way it navigates questions of identity & politics, but for the variety & virtuosity of its use of form." --Robert Archambeau, The Hudson Review

"...semiautomatic grapples with the violent imprint America has made upon black bodies through the ages."--Tracy K. Smith, The New York Times, "Political Poetry Is Hot Again. The Poet Laureate Explores Why, and How"

"Ablaze with wordplay and formal ingenuity, Shockley's poems chronicle the horrors of the 21st century while igniting the imagination as an act of hope."--John McMurtrie, San Francisco Chronicle, "Year in review: The best books of 2018"

About the Author:

EVIE SHOCKLEY is the author of several collections of poetry, including a half-red sea and the new black. She has won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and fellowships from Cave Canem, MacDowell, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. She currently is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University New Brunswick.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0819577448
• ISBN 13: 9780819577443
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 104