Unshuttered

Poems
Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-0-8101-4563-4
Verlag: Northwestern University Press

Buch, Englisch, 112 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 231 mm, Gewicht: 318 g

An award-winning author presents a portrait of Black America in the nineteenth century
 
Unshuttered: Poems is the vessel for poetic personae and a selection of antique photographs of Black Americans, which Patricia Smith has collected over the course of twenty years. In these hard-to-find images, men, women, and children peer at us from the past, stripped of their lives and histories. Smith’s language and searing lines ghost-story the unnamed forebears who daguerreotype-stare from the page while backdropping the poet’s own losses:

We ache for fiction etched in black and white. Our eyes
never touch. These tragic grays and bustles, mourners’
 
hats plopped high upon our tamed but tangled crowns, strain
to disguise what yearning does with us.
 
This masterful and haunting mosaic is a search for lost histories, both personal and inherited, from an incendiary era in human history. Bound in black and white, these faces, staring back, find a home and resting place in the words of one of American literature’s finest wordsmiths. In return, the wordsmith uncovers her own unknown history.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Smith, Patricia

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Minderheiten, Interkulturelle & Multikulturelle Fragen
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Fotografie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Soziologie von Migranten und Minderheiten

Über Autor(innen)

Patricia Smith is a National Book Award finalist (2008) and the author of eight critically acknowledged volumes of poetry, including Incendiary Art: Poems (TriQuarterly Books), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the 2018 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in the poetry category, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. A Guggenheim Fellow, a Civitella Ranieri Fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, Smith received the Poetry Foundation Ruth Lily Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2021. She is a professor of English at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, a faculty member with Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, and an instructor at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers’ Conference.