Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth
New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
New and selected poems from the great Pulitzer Prize–winning poet
These songs run along dirt roads
& highways, crisscross lonely seas
& scale mountains, traverse skies
& underworlds of neon honkytonk,
Wherever blues dare to travel.
Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth brings 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.
The 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, Poetry). 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 The New York Times Book Review, “He refuses to be trivial; and he even dares beauty.”
"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. They have to feel it's true." —Ta-Nehisi Coates, The New York Times Style Magazine
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With 140 poems, including 12 new works, this dazzling collection makes a definitive case for the Pulitzer Prize winning Komunyakaa as a monumental and singular American voice. A jazzy master of enjambment and arresting opening lines, Komunyakaa synthesizes natural history, myth, and wide-ranging intellectual curiosity into sensory acts of witness. Rarely has lyrical precision felt this muscular; Komunyakaa likes to invoke a reader's senses "as the mind/ runs to keep up." His connoisseurship of blues, soul, and jazz is vividly rendered: "An echo of Sam Cooke hangs/ in bruised air, & for a minute// the silence of Fate reigns over/ day & night." Frequent evocations of battle informed by his own experience of war provide subtle moral commentary: "After a nightlong white-hot hellfire/ of blue steel, we rolled into Baghdad,/ plugged into government-issued earphones,/ hearing hard rock," finding echoes in the microcosmic "Slaves Among Blades of Grass": "The Amazon ants dispatch/ Scouts armed with mandibles/ Sharp as sabers." In this roving survey of history and nature, violence often meets beauty, but Komunyakaa never forgets how "The body remembers/ every wish one lives for or doesn't."