suddenly we (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Evie Shockley's new poems invite us to dream―and work―toward a more capacious "we"\nIn her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious "we." How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley's poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth.\nperched\ni am black, comely, 
a girl on the cusp of desire. 
my dangling toes take the rest 
the rest of my body refuses. spine upright, 
my pose proposes anticipation. i poise 
in copper-colored tension, intent on 
manifesting my soul in the discouraging world.\nunder the rough eyes of others, i stiffen.\nif i must be hard, it will be as a tree, alive 
with change. inside me, a love of beauty rises 
like sap, sprouts from my scalp 
and stretches forth. i send out my song, an aria 
blue and feathered, and grow toward it, 
choirs bare, but soon to bud. i am 
black and becoming.\n―after Alison Saar's Blue Bird

Literature & Fiction

Shockley, Evie

Poetry

Wesleyan University Press

Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (2012) Smart, grounded, and lyrical, Evie Shockley's the new black integrates powerful ideas about "blackness," past and present, through the medium of beautifully crafted verse. the new black sees our racial past inevitably shaping our contemporary moment, but struggles to remember and reckon with the impact of generational shifts: what seemed impossible to people not many years ago―for example, the election of an African American president―will have always been a part of the world of children born in the new millennium. All of the poems here, whether sonnet, mesostic, or deconstructed blues, exhibit a formal flair. They speak to the changes we have experienced as a society in the last few decades―changes that often challenge our past strategies for resisting racism and, for African Americans, ways of relating to one another. The poems embrace a formal ambiguity that echoes the uncertainty these shifts produce, while reveling in language play that enables readers to "laugh to keep from crying." They move through nostalgia, even as they insist on being alive to the present and point longingly towards possible futures. Check for the online reader's companion at http://http://thenewblack.site.wesleyan.edu.

the new black (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

semiautomatic (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

"Poetry by Evie Shockley, critiquing daily life as well as responding to race- and gender-based violence"--

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.

Beginning with a deceptively simple question—What do we mean when we designate behaviors, values, or forms of expression as “black”?—Evie Shockley’s Renegade Poetics separates what we think we know about black aesthetics from the more complex and nuanced possibilities the concept has long encompassed. The study reminds us, first, that even among the radicalized young poets and theorists who associated themselves with the Black Arts Movement that began in the mid-1960s, the contours of black aesthetics were deeply contested and, second, that debates about the relationship between aesthetics and politics for African American artists continue into the twenty-first century. Shockley argues that a rigid notion of black aesthetics commonly circulates that is little more than a caricature of the concept. She sees the Black Aesthetic as influencing not only African American poets and their poetic production, but also, through its shaping of criteria and values, the reception of their work. Taking as its starting point the young BAM artists’ and activists’ insistence upon the interconnectedness of culture and politics, this study delineates how African American poets—in particular, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Harryette Mullen, Anne Spencer, Ed Roberson, and Will Alexander—generate formally innovative responses to their various historical and cultural contexts. Out of her readings, Shockley eloquently builds a case for redefining black aesthetics descriptively, to account for nearly a century of efforts by African American poets and critics to name and tackle issues of racial identity and self-determination. In the process, she resituates innovative poetry that has been dismissed, marginalized, or misread because its experiments were not “recognizably black”—or, in relation to the avant-garde tradition, because they were.

Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Contemp North American Poetry)

History & Criticism

University Of Iowa Press

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Books by Shockley, Evie

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Shockley, Evie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

suddenly we (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

suddenly we (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

the new black (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

the new black (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

semiautomatic (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

semiautomatic (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Contemp North American Poetry)