In this Book
- semiautomatic
- Book
- 2017
- Published by: Wesleyan University Press
- Series: Wesleyan Poetry Program
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.
Table of Contents
- i. o the times
- weather or not
- p. 5
- buried truths
- p. 7
- mirror and canvas
- pp. 10-11
- if a junco
- p. 12
- banking on amnesia
- pp. 13-14
- a one-act play
- p. 15
- in a no-win zone
- p. 16
- ii. the topsy suite
- topsy talks about her role
- pp. 32-33
- fromtopsy in wonderland
- pp. 34-39
- iii. refrain
- keep your eye on
- pp. 46-49
- sore score
- p. 51
- i declare war
- p. 53
- legit-i-mate
- p. 58
- improphised
- pp. 59-60
- cogito ergo loquor
- pp. 61-63
- a dark scrawl
- pp. 66-67
- a one-act play
- p. 68
- fukushima blues
- pp. 69-71
- supply and demand
- pp. 73-74
- [“stop : meet with me here . . .”]
- pp. 75-76
- iv. blues modality
- lotto motto
- p. 81
- a one-act play
- p. 82
- the obsolete army
- pp. 87-88
- truth in advertising
- p. 89
- upon this plot
- pp. 90-92
- how long has this jayne been gone?
- pp. 93-95
- du bois in ghana
- pp. 96-98
- cosmography
- p. 99
- acknowledgments
- pp. 107-112