Winner of Hurston/Wright Foundation’s Legacy Award for Poetry, given by the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, 2018
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.
Spis treści
that’s a rap (sheet music for alphabet street)
I. O THE TIMES
weather or not
the way we live now ::
buried truths
what’s not to liken?
playing with fire
mirror and canvas
if a junco
banking on amnesia
a one-act play
in a no-win zone
corrective rape (or, i’m here to help)
Sex Trafficking Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in the USA (or, The Nation’s Plague in Plain Sight)
II. THE TOPSY SUITE
studies in antebellum literature (or, topsy-turvy)
topsy’s notes on taxonomy
topsy talks about her role
from topsy in wonderland
[’NOW, READER…’]
III. REFRAIN
a-lyrical ballad (or, how america reminds us of the value of family)
keep your eye on
haibun for a parasitic pre-apocalyptic blues
sore score
in the california mountains, far from shelby / county, alabama and even farther from / the supreme court building, the black poet / seeks the low-down from a kindred entity
i declare war
acrobatic
song in the back yard
legend
legit-i-mate
improphised
cogito ergo loquor
philosophically immune
’the people want the regime to fall’
a dark scrawl
a one-act play
fukushima blues
jim crow stole my father’s wings
supply and demand
[’STOP : MEET WITH ME HERE…’]
IV. BLUES MODALITY
preface to a twenty-first-century survival guide
senzo
lotto motto
a one-act play
to be continued blues
of speech
the obsolete army
truth in advertising
upon this plot
how long has this jayne been gone?
du bois in ghana
cosmography
circe / odysseus / black odysseys (a remix-collage)
notes
acknowledgments
O autorze
Poet & literary scholar Evie Shockley thinks, creates, and writes with her eye on a Black feminist horizon. Her books of poetry include suddenly we, semiautomatic and the new black. Her work has twice garnered the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, has been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and has appeared internationally. Her honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and the Stephen Henderson Award, and her joys include participating in poetry communities such as Cave Canem and collaborating with like-minded artists working in various media. Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.
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