Small Congregations: New and Selected Poems (The American Poetry)

Thylias Moss (b. 1954 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American poet, writer, experimental filmmaker, sound artist and playwright, of African American, Indian, and European heritage, who has published a number of poetry collections, children's books, essays, and multimedia work she calls poam s, products of acts of making, related to her work in Limited Fork Theory. Among her awards are a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Artist's Fellowship from the Massachusetts Arts Council, an NEA grant, and the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize Witter Bynner award for poetry. This was her fifth book of poetry. Limited Fork Theory is the study of interacting systems. Each tine of a limited fork also functions as a root and/or a branch and may curve, circle, disappear for a while, temporarily connecting things, possibly even snagging something tasty, something possibly nourishing, something that can be ingested --maybe without harm(ing us), but what is ingested will change during this process, and we may change, so the temporary connections is also a means of exchange: we give something and we receive something; we may not realize immediately that we are different, but we are. Moss is a visionary storyteller, a political and religious poet. It's the world of 'marvelous thirsts' and 'glorious hungers', to use her words. She knows that language is both the individual and the community. She has a sense of history, the complexity and variety of Black experience in America. What drama, humor, imagination, intelligence, and range of subject matter these poems have. Thylias Moss is a major figure in contemporary American poetry. Thylias Moss names the black truths behind white lies. These poems are angry, defiant, yet informed with a sense of the sacred in their images, in their language, in their mimesis of transcendent ritual in everyday life. Here is a writer who speaks bitterness and makes her own music of it.