ChickenBones: A Journal
for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes
www.nathanielturner.com
my story is / inside a wino’s bottle / the cup blood leaps into
eight-to-the-bar / a man on his knees / facing the golden calf
the silver fish of old lust
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Books by Yusef Komunyakaa
I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head / Dien Cai Dau / Magic City / Neo Vernacular / Thieves of Paradise / Talking Dirty to the Gods
Pleasure Dome / Jazz Poetry Anthology / The Second Set / Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy
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Blues Chant Hoodoo Revival
By Yusef Komunyakaa
my story is
how deep the heart runs
to hide & laugh
with your hands
over your blank mouth
face behind the mask
talking in tongues
something tearing
feathers from a crow
that screams from the furnace
the black candle
in a skull
sweet pan of meat
let’s pour the river’s rainbow
into our stone water jars
bad luck isn’t red flowers
crashed under jackboots
your story is
a crippled animal
dragging a steel trap
across desert sand
a bee’s sting inside your heart
& its song of honey
in my groin
a factory of blue jays
in honey locust leaves
wet pages of smoke
like a man
deserting his shadow
in dark woods
the dog that limps away
& rotten fruit on the trees
this story is
the speaking skull
on the mantelpiece
the wingspan of a hawk
at the edge of a coyote’s cry
the seventh son’s mojo hands
holding his life together
with a black cat bone
the six grandfathers
& spider woman
the ghost dance vision
deer that can’t
stand for falling
wunmonije witch doctor
backwater blues
juju man
a silk gown on the floor
a black bowl
on a red lacquered table
x-rated
because it’s true
let’s pour starlight
from our stone water jars
pain isn’t just red flowers
crushed under jackboots
my story is
inside a wino’s bottle
the cup blood leaps into
eight-to-the-bar
a man on his knees
facing the golden calf
the silver fish of old lust
mama hoodoo
a gullah basket
woven from your hair
love note from the madhouse
thornbushes
naming the shape
of things to come
old murder weapons
strings of piano wire
let’s pour the night
into our stone isn’t red flowers
this song isn’t red flowers
crushed under silence
our story is
a rifle butt
across our heads
arpeggio of bowed grass
among glass trees
where the kick down doors
& we swan-dive from
the brooklyn bridge
a post-hypnotic suggestion
a mosaic membrane
skin of words
mirrors shattered
in roadhouses
in the gun-barrel night
how a machine moves
deeper into piles
of bones
the way we
crowd at the foot
of the gallows
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Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaa
Edited by Shirley A. James Hanshaw
Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaa brings together over two decades of interviews and profiles with one of America’s most prolific and acclaimed contemporary poets. Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947) describes his work alternately as “word paintings” and as “music,” and his affinity with the visual and aural arts is amply displayed in these conversations. The volume also addresses the diversity and magnitude of Komunyakaa’s literary output. His collaborations with artists in a variety of genres, including music, dance, drama, opera, and painting have produced groundbreaking performance pieces. Throughout the collection, Komunyakaa’s interest in finding and creating poetry across the artistic spectrum is made manifest.
For his collection Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, 1977-1989, Komunyakaa became the first African American male to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Through his work he provides keen insight into life’s mysteries from seemingly inconsequential and insignificant life forms (“Ode to the Maggot”) to some of the most compelling historical and life-altering events of our time, such as the Vietnam War (“Facing It”). Influenced strongly by jazz, blues, and folklore, as well as the classical poetic tradition, his poetry comprises a riveting chronicle of the African American experience.
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
By Charles C. Mann
Im a big fan of Charles Manns previous book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, in which he provides a sweeping and provocative examination of North and South America prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Its exhaustively researched but so wonderfully written that its anything but exhausting to read. With his follow-up, 1493, Mann has taken it to a new, truly global level. Building on the groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby (author of The Columbian Exchange and, Im proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer), Mann has written nothing less than the story of our world: how a planet of what were once several autonomous continents is quickly becoming a single, globalized entity.
Mann not only talked to countless scientists and researchers; he visited the places he writes about, and as a consequence, the book has a marvelously wide-ranging yet personal feel as we follow Mann from one far-flung corner of the world to the next. And always, the prose is masterful. In telling the improbable story of how Spanish and Chinese cultures collided in the Philippines in the sixteenth century, he takes us to the island of Mindoro whose southern coast consists of a number of small bays, one next to another like tooth marks in an apple. We learn how the spread of malaria, the potato, tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar cane have disrupted and convulsed the planet and will continue to do so until we are finally living on one integrated or at least close-to-integrated Earth. Whether or not the human instigators of all this remarkable change will survive the process they helped to initiate more than five hundred years ago remains, Mann suggests in this monumental and revelatory book, an open question.
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about The Persistence of the Color Line is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the positions about Mr. Obama staked out by black commentators on the left and right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley. He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr. Smiley consistently voiced skepticism regarding whether blacks should back Obama . . .
The finest chapter in The Persistence of the Color Line is so resonant, and so personal, it could nearly be the basis for a book of its own. That chapter is titled Reverend Wright and My Father: Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism. Recalling some of the criticisms of Americas past made by Mr. Obamas former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with feeling about his own father, who put each of his three of his children through Princeton but who never forgave American society for its racist mistreatment of him and those whom he most loved. His father distrusted the police, who had frequently called him boy, and rejected patriotism. Mr. Kennedys father relished Muhammad Alis quip that the Vietcong had never called him nigger. The author places his father, and Mr. Wright, in sympathetic historical light.
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The White Masters of the World
From The World and Africa, 1965
W. E. B. Du Bois Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization (Fletcher)
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan / The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll / Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson / Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804 / January 1, 1804 — The Founding of Haiti
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updated 3 April 2010
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