The Driftless Series & Wesleyan Poetry Series

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    Exposition Park

    Roberto Tejada

    <P>Imagine a walking tour of stanzas and prose poems that give lyric voice to sight, public speech, and spectacle. In Exhibition Park, Roberto Tejada delivers a command performance in mixed genres that compel an array of literary styles. His poetry undertakes a wide range of subjects motivated by artworks from Latin America and the United States covering the colonial period to the present day. </P><P>In serial poems, short sketches, guidebook parodies, painterly triptychs, translations, and other word-based dioramas, Tejada coins wonder with historical styles—baroque, classic, and experimental. As likened to a world's fair, the resulting voices intone global stories, the dream life of art, and first-person atmospheres both premodern and postindustrial. </P><P>"Tejada's work is with dismantling borders and upsetting classifications… The result is a layered poetry that finds its form in dense stanzas composed of lines that frequently veer toward a kind of fractured prose…"—Alan Gilbert in Another Future: Poetry and Modern Art in a Postmodern Twilight</P><P>"You walk through his world as a voyeur, a traveler of mirrors, witnessing your own reflection in the masses of flesh, simultaneously aroused and disturbed at the same time. Tejada's work is an invitation, a window into another world, unabashedly erotic, and succinct."—Christine Lark Fox, Poetry Project Newsletter, about Mirrors for Gold</P>

    Rococo and Other Worlds

    Afzal Ahmed Syed

    <P>Afzal Ahmed Syed holds a unique place among contemporary poets of the Urdu language, as an acknowledged master of both the classical and modern Urdu poetic forms. The poems in Rococo and Other Worlds explore the mythology and historical realities of South Asia and the Middle East; their bold imagery creates narratives of voluptuous perfection, which remain inseparable from the political realities that Syed witnessed as a young observer of the violent separation of East Pakistan and emergence of Bangladesh in 1971 and of the Lebanese civil war in 1976. Musharraf Ali Farooqi's sensitive translations bring this extraordinary work to English readers for the first time.</P>

    Elegguas

    Kamau Brathwaite

    <P>Kamau Brathwaite is a major Caribbean poet of his generation and one of the major world poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Elegguas—a play on «elegy» and «Eleggua,» the Yoruba deity of the threshold, doorway, and crossroad—is a collection of poems for the departed. Modernist and post-modernist in inspiration, Elegguas draws together traditions of speaking with the dead, from Rilke's Duino Elegies to the Jamaican kumina practice of bringing down spirits of the dead to briefly inhabit the bodies of the faithful, so that the ancestors may provide spiritual assistance and advice to those here on earth. The book is also profoundly political, including elegies for assassinated revolutionaries like in the masterful «Poem for Walter Rodney.»</P><P>Throughout his poetry, Brathwaite foregrounds «nation-language,» that difference in syntax, in rhythm, and timbre that is most closely allied to the African experience in the Caribbean, using the computer to explore the graphic rendition of nuances of language. Brathwaite experiments using his own Sycorax fonts, as well as deliberate misspellings («calibanisms») and deviations in punctuation. But this is never simple surface aesthetic, rather an expression of the turbulence (in history, in dream) depicted in the poems. This collection is a stunning follow-up to Brathwaite's Born to Slow Horses (Wesleyan, 2005), winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize.</P>