In this Book
- Congotronic
- Book
- 2014
- Published by: University of Iowa Press
- Series: Kuhl House Poets
summary
At once original, strange, funny, and unnerving, Shane Book’s Congotronic takes the reader into unstable territory, where multiple layers of voice, diction, and music collide. Some of these poems have the sparse directness of a kind of bleak prayer; others mingle the earthbound rhythms of hip-hop with the will-to-transcendence of high Romanticism.
Harnessing techniques of the cinematic and audio arts, Book’s poems splice, sample, collage, and jump-cut language from an array of sources, including slave narratives, Western philosophy, hip hop lyrics, and the diaries of plantation owners. In fusing disparate texts, each poem in this collection attempts to create a community in language. Thus, at its core, the project is utopic—or more precisely, to borrow from Duke Ellington—the project is “blutopic.”
The book’s anchoring series contains an apocryphal narrative grounded in the journey of the Middle Passage and an older mythic history from the West African epic of Sundiata. Here elements of Afrofuturism coagulate with an R&B grin as social forces challenge a sense of personhood, prompting free-jazz inflected conversations between the pieces of a shattered, polyvocal self.
Here is a world poet of the Sonic Global South sheathed in a Northern Hemispheric glow suit, high “on Coltrane, on Zeus” but also on the old and new schools of Descartes, M.I.A., Cecil Taylor, Gilbert Ryle, Freud, and Jay Z, among others—or as one poem puts it, the “aural truths.”
Harnessing techniques of the cinematic and audio arts, Book’s poems splice, sample, collage, and jump-cut language from an array of sources, including slave narratives, Western philosophy, hip hop lyrics, and the diaries of plantation owners. In fusing disparate texts, each poem in this collection attempts to create a community in language. Thus, at its core, the project is utopic—or more precisely, to borrow from Duke Ellington—the project is “blutopic.”
The book’s anchoring series contains an apocryphal narrative grounded in the journey of the Middle Passage and an older mythic history from the West African epic of Sundiata. Here elements of Afrofuturism coagulate with an R&B grin as social forces challenge a sense of personhood, prompting free-jazz inflected conversations between the pieces of a shattered, polyvocal self.
Here is a world poet of the Sonic Global South sheathed in a Northern Hemispheric glow suit, high “on Coltrane, on Zeus” but also on the old and new schools of Descartes, M.I.A., Cecil Taylor, Gilbert Ryle, Freud, and Jay Z, among others—or as one poem puts it, the “aural truths.”
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-xii
- African Evening
- p. 1
- World Town
- p. 2
- Security of the First World
- pp. 3-4
- Mack Daddy Manifesto
- pp. 8-12
- The Collected Novellas of Gilbert Ryle
- They Foment a Revolt
- p. 21
- Bronze Age
- pp. 33-34
- Chinese Blow Up Doll
- pp. 35-36
- Everywhere
- p. 38
- Flagelliforms
- Flagelliform 61: Tilted away
- pp. 45-47
- Flagelliform 7
- pp. 48-49
- Flagelliform 22
- pp. 52-53
- Flagelliform 3
- pp. 54-55
- Flagelliform 45
- pp. 56-58
- Flagelliform 50
- p. 59
- Flagelliform 13: Night Births
- pp. 60-61
- Flagelliform 79
- pp. 64-66
Additional Information
ISBN
9781609383084
Related ISBN(s)
9781609383077
MARC Record
OCLC
888045035
Pages
81
Launched on MUSE
2014-09-06
Language
English
Open Access
No
Copyright
2014