Chameleon Couch: Poems

Name: Chameleon Couch: Poems
Price: 16.0 USD
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ISBN: 9780374533144

by Yusef Komunyakaa

$16.00

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A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011 Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry

An intimate collection from one of America's most important poets

The latest collection from one of our preeminent poets, The Chameleon Couch is also one of Yusef Komunyakaa's most personal to date. As in his breakthrough work, Copacetic, 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.

The book moves seamlessly across cultural and historical boundaries, evoking Komunyakaa's capacity for cultural excavation, through artifact and place. The Chameleon Couch begins 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.

Publisher:: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN:: 9780374533144
Binding:: Paperback
Pages:: 128
Authors:: Yusef Komunyakaa
Published Date:: 2012-03-27
Language:: English

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African American & Black All Poetry Places Yusef Komunyakaa

About Yusef Komunyakaa

Born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, Yusef Komunyakaa served in the United States Army from 1969 to 1970 as a correspondent and managing editor of the Southern Cross during the Vietnam War, earning a Bronze Star. He holds a BA from the University of Colorado Springs, an MA from Colorado State University, and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. His collection Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems 1977–1989 (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Other collections include Dien Cai Dau (Wesleyan, 1988) and Talking Dirty to the Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). He is a distinguished senior poet at New York University.

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Chameleon Couch: Poems

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