Katrina's Imprint: Race and Vulnerability in America (Rutgers Studies on Race and Ethnicity)

Mia Bay

Evie Shockley

Keith Wailoo

William Rodgers

Nancy Boyd-Franklin

Karen M. O'Neill

Jeffrey Dowd

Roland Anglin

John Aiello

Niki Dickerson

Ann Fabian

Richard Mizelle

Lyra Stein

David Troutt

Rutgers University Press

semiautomatic (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

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.

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Wesleyan

In a half-red sea, Evie Shockley is 'dreaming the lives of the ancestors.' Navigating against prevailing currents, these poems sail on eddy and backflow, taking inspiration from knots and twists of American history and culture. Whether improvising between the lines of a slave narrative in 'henry bibb considers love and livery,' amplifying Lady Day's most devastating blues in 'you can say that again, billie,' or going freestyle with 'double bop for ntozake shange,' Shockley's imagination travels every which away. In 'a thousand words' and other reflections on contemporary events, Shockley's firm grounding in history adds weight and depth to her observations of the recent past and present. --Harryette Mullen, Advance Reader

a half-red sea (The Carolina Wren Press Poetry Series, 10)

Carolina Wren Press

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Books by Evie Shockley