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Outlandish Blues

Book
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
2012
Published by: Wesleyan University Press
Series: Wesleyan Poetry Program
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Winner of the Harper Lee Award (2018)

Fierce and sensual, the poems in Outlandish Blues merge everyday speech with a shimmering lyricism and burst from the page into song. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers sees the blues, what she terms the "shared 'blue notes,''' as an important intersection between the secular and the divine, and between the various African American vernacular traditions, from spirituals to jazz. Part Nina Simone, part Bessie Smith, her poems are filled with a sweaty honesty, moving from the personal to the collective experience. This movement is often accomplished through the use of personae, concentrated here in a stunning series of poems on the Biblical figures of Hagar and Sarah. Whether about a contemporary domestic scene, a slave ship, or Aretha Franklin, these are poems that speak to the soul of experience.

Table of Contents

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Cover

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

pp. ix-x

I

Fast Skirt Blues: for V.

pp. 3-4

Muse, a Lady Cautioning: for Billie Holiday

pp. 5-5

The Battered Blues (Four Movements)

pp. 6-10

Don’t Know What Love Is

pp. 11-11

Worn Blues Refrain

pp. 12-12

Pantoum for a Black Man on a Greyhound Bus

pp. 13-14

Think of James Brown Pleading: for Michael Datcher

pp. 15-16

II

Sarai Gives Hagar the Egyptian to Abram

pp. 19-19

Hagar’s Night with Abram

pp. 20-20

Sarai Waits for the Birth of Hagar's Son

pp. 21-21

Hagar to Sarai

pp. 22-22

Sarah Overhears the Three Angels Telling Abraham God Will Destroy Sodom

pp. 23-23

The Wife of Lot Before the Fire

pp. 24-25

The Wife of Lot Has a Premonition of Her Death

pp. 26-27

The Wife of Lot Witnesses Her Husband Offering Their Two Daughters to Sodom’s Crowd

pp. 28-28

The Wife of Lot After the Fire

pp. 29-30

The Two Daughters of Lot After the Fire

pp. 31-32

Sarah Gives Birth to Isaac

pp. 33-33

Sarah Confronts Abraham over Hagar

pp. 34-34

Hagar in the Wilderness

pp. 35-36

III

The Book of Alabama: Chapter Coltrane / for Michael S. Harper

pp. 39-39

Five Note Range of Sorrow: for Alvin Ailey's Revelations

pp. 40-40

Day Clean: for Natasha

pp. 41-42

Outlandish Blues (The Movie)

pp. 43-44

Now with the Morning: for James Baldwin and Billy Jack Gaither

pp. 45-45

Incident at Cross Plains (The Lynching of William Luke, 1870)

pp. 46-46

Unidentified Female Student, Former Slave (Talladega College, circa 1885)

pp. 47-47

Confederate Pride Day at Bama (Tuscaloosa, 1994)

pp. 48-48

Aretha at Fame Studios

pp. 49-50

Notes

pp. 51-52
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