{"title":"Yusef Komunyakaa","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"neon-vernacular-new-and-selected-poems","title":"Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAn award-winning poet's testimony of the war in Vietnam.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Yusef Komunyakaa","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43793316282410,"sku":"9780819512116","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/neon-vernacular-new-and-selected-poems-3502127.jpg?v=1762150940"},{"product_id":"dien-cai-dau","title":"Dien Cai Dau","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003ePoetry that precisely conjures images of the war in Vietnam by an award-winning author.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Yusef Komunyakaa","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43793316741162,"sku":"9780819511645","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/dien-cai-dau-1677255.jpg?v=1762150884"},{"product_id":"night-animals","title":"Night Animals","description":"The poems in \u003ci\u003eNight Animals\u003c\/i\u003e, by Yusef Komunyakaa, climb so deeply into the being of various beasts, from cricket to leopard to snowy owl, that we read them with an uncanny shiver of recognition. Without ever fully abandoning his human skin, Komunyakaa inhabits both the outer and inner lives of these creatures. The images are a brilliant match for the poems, each of Rachel Bliss's surreal animals populate a realm somewhere between our two species--birds with teeth, men with antlers, a duck wearing suspenders. Both image and word are dense and dark, intensely focused around a kind of hunger. The poet has been startling us with his rich, disturbing, and important poems for many years. \u003ci\u003eNight Animals\u003c\/i\u003e extends Yusef Komunyakaa's remarkable oeuvre.","brand":"Yusef Komunyakaa","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43793316937770,"sku":"9781946448583","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/night-animals-7872830.jpg?v=1762150883"},{"product_id":"chameleon-couch-poems","title":"Chameleon Couch: Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA \u003ci\u003eBoston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e Best Poetry Book of 2011 Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAn intimate collection from one of America's most important poets\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe latest collection from one of our preeminent poets, \u003ci\u003eThe Chameleon Couch \u003c\/i\u003eis also one of Yusef Komunyakaa's most personal to date. As in his breakthrough work, \u003ci\u003eCopacetic\u003c\/i\u003e, Komunyakaa writes again of music as muse--from a blues club in the East Village to the shakuhachi of Basho. Beginning with \"Canticle,\" this varied new collection often returns to the idea of poem as hymn, ethereal and haunting, as Komunyakaa reveals glimpses of memory, myth, and violence. With contemplations that spring up along walks or memories conjured by the rhythms of New York, Komunyakaa pays tribute more than ever before to those who came before him. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe book moves seamlessly across cultural and historical boundaries, evoking Komunyakaa's capacity for cultural excavation, through artifact and place. \u003ci\u003eThe Chameleon Couch \u003c\/i\u003ebegins in and never fully leaves the present--an urban modernity framed, brilliantly, in pastoral-minded verse. The poems seek the cracks beneath the landscape, whether New York or Ghana or Poland, finding in each elements of wisdom or unexpected beauty. The collection is sensually, beautifully relaxed in rhetoric; in poems like \"Cape Coast Castle,\" Komunyakaa reminds us of his gift for combining the personal with the universal, one moment addressing a lover, the next moving the focus outward, until both poet and reader are implicated in the book's startling world.","brand":"Yusef Komunyakaa","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43793317003306,"sku":"9780374533144","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/chameleon-couch-poems-3045385.jpg?v=1762150883"},{"product_id":"everyday-mojo-songs-of-earth-new-and-selected-poems-2001-2021","title":"Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eNew and selected poems from the great Pulitzer Prize-winning poet \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eThese songs run along dirt roads\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u0026amp; highways, crisscross lonely seas\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u0026amp; scale mountains, traverse skies\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u0026amp; underworlds of neon honkytonk, \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eWherever blues dare to travel.\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eEveryday Mojo Songs of Earth \u003c\/i\u003ebrings together selected poems from the past twenty years of Yusef Komunyakaa's work, as well as new poems from the Pulitzer Prize winner. Komunyakaa's masterful, concise verse conjures arresting images of peace and war, the natural power of the earth and of love, his childhood in the American South and his service in Vietnam, the ugly violence of racism in America, and the meaning of power and morality. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe new poems in this collection add a new refrain to the jazz-inflected rhythms of one of our \"most significant and individual voices\" (David Wojahn, \u003ci\u003ePoetry\u003c\/i\u003e). Komunyakaa writes of a young man fashioning a slingshot, workers who \"honor the Earth by opening shine \/ inside the soil,\" and the sounds of a saxophone filling a dim lounge in New Jersey. As April Bernard wrote in \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \"He refuses to be trivial; and he even dares beauty.\" \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"Probably my favorite living poet. No one else taught me more about how important it was to think about how words make people feel. It's not enough for people to know something is true. 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His line is longer and looser than in \u003ci\u003eTaboo \u003c\/i\u003eor \u003ci\u003eTalking Dirty to the Gods\u003c\/i\u003e, and in long poems like \"Autobiography of My Alter Ego\" he sounds almost breathless, an exhausted but desperate prophet. With the leaps and improvisational flourishes of a jazz soloist, Komunyakaa imagines \"the old masters of Shock \u0026amp; Awe\" daydreaming of \"lovely Penelope \/ like a trophy.\"","brand":"Yusef Komunyakaa","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43793317134378,"sku":"9780374531911","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/warhorses-8656959.jpg?v=1762150883"},{"product_id":"emperor-of-water-clocks","title":"Emperor of Water Clocks","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe wildly enchanting new collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\"If I am not Ulysses, I am \/ his dear, ruthless half brother.\" So announces Yusef Komunyakaa early in his lush new collection, \u003ci\u003eThe Emperor of Water Clocks\u003c\/i\u003e. And Ulysses (or his half brother) is but one of the characters Komunyakaa conjures over the course of this densely lyrical book. Here his speaker observes a doomed court jester; here another recalls Napoleon as the emperor \"tells the doctor to cut out his heart \/ \u0026amp; send it to the empress, Marie-Louise\"; and here he is just a man, reflecting on why he'd \"rather die a poet \/ than a warrior.\" \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThrough these mutations and migrations and permutations and peregrinations, there are constants: Komunyakaa's jazz-inflected rhythms, his effortlessly surreal images, his celebration of natural beauty and of love. There is also his insistent inquiry into the structures and struggles of power: not only, say, of king against jester but of man against his own desire, and of the present against the pernicious influence of the past. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eAnother brilliant collection from the man David Wojahn has called one of our \"most significant and individual voices,\" \u003ci\u003eThe Emperor of Water Clocks \u003c\/i\u003edelights, challenges, and satisfies.","brand":"Yusef Komunyakaa","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43793317199914,"sku":"9780374536572","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/emperor-of-water-clocks-2101362.jpg?v=1762150883"},{"product_id":"talking-dirty-to-the-gods-poems","title":"Talking Dirty to the Gods: Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA daredevil poetic achievement from a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Yusef Komunyakaa's \u003ci\u003eTalking Dirty to the Gods\u003c\/i\u003e was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e . . . A god isn't worth\u003cbr\u003eA drop of water in the hell of his good \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eImagination, if we can't curse \u003cbr\u003eSunsets \u0026amp; threaten to forsake him\u003cbr\u003eIn his storehouse of belladonna, \u003cbr\u003eTiger hornets, \u0026amp; snakebites.\u003cbr\u003e --from \"Meditations in a Swine Yard\" \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eNo turn in any life cycle is taboo as Yusef Komunyakaa examines the primal rituals shared by insects, animals, human beings, and deities in \u003ci\u003eTalking Dirty to the Gods\u003c\/i\u003e. From \"Hearsay\" to \"Heresy,\" these 132 poems, each consisting of four quatrains, are framed by innuendo and lively satire. Komunyakaa looks to nature and configures his own paradigm, in which an event as commonplace as the jewel wasp laying an egg in a cockroach becomes every bit as grand as Zeus's infidelity. The formally rigorous collection is itself a design for a systematic cosmos, a world compressed but abundant in surprise and delight.","brand":"Yusef Komunyakaa","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43793317265450,"sku":"9780374527938","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/talking-dirty-to-the-gods-poems-7564889.jpg?v=1762150882"},{"product_id":"thieves-of-paradise","title":"Thieves of Paradise","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003ePulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa delivers a powerful meditation on American, and particularly African American, life in the wake of Vietnam.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCentering on the disorienting experiences of the returning soldier and drawing on multiple traditions, Yusef Komunyakaa's poetry is potent, live, and, like the strains of jazz running through it, an erudite and soulful music.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Yusef Komunyakaa","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43793317330986,"sku":"9780819564221","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/thieves-of-paradise-6748924.jpg?v=1762150882"},{"product_id":"magic-city","title":"Magic City","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAn award-winning poet evokes his childhood in Louisiana.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKomunyakaa vividly evokes his childhood in Bogalusa, Louisiana, once a center of Klan activity, and later a focus of Civil Rights efforts. He portrays a child's dawning awareness of the natural and social order around him, rhythms of life in the community, the constant struggle for survival in the face of poverty and racism, the adolescent's awakening sexuality, the beginnings of the poet's awareness of his life and community as it exists in the context of history, and his emerging understanding of his own identity.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Yusef Komunyakaa","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43947294097450,"sku":"9780819512086","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/magic-city-7629122.jpg?v=1767955511"},{"product_id":"trading-riffs-to-slay-monsters-poems","title":"Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters: Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA witty and searching collaborative poetic work composed during the pandemic. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eLet's go back far as we dare\u003cbr\u003eto go back to that land bridge\u003cbr\u003emade of untrusting earth \u0026amp; ice, \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eto a boorish faith in our rhythm\u003cbr\u003eof footsteps, the fleeting mantra\u003cbr\u003eof wordless dreams . . .  \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eSo begins \u003ci\u003eTrading Riffs to Slay Monsters\u003c\/i\u003e, the collaborative work of an elder statesman of American poetry and a young emerging poet. 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