Afaa Michael Weaver

Winner of the 2008 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence "Weaver has crafted a virtual planet in this book with plenty of alternate geographies for readers of all flavors and stripes. Marvelous. Huge. Prodigious.” —North American Review

Poems 1985 to 2005

The Plum Flower Dance

Ishmael Reed

Sonia Sanchez

Thylias Moss

Martin Espada

rita dove

Patricia Spears Jones

An anthology of poems addressing the issue of violence against African-Americans.

Poems to Stretch the Sky

Resisting Arrest

Some Days It's a Slow Walk to Evening

A generous, retrospective edition of this African-American poet.

Poems Selected & New

Multitudes

Moving essays on family by African-American poetry and prose writers.

African-American Writers on Family

These Hands I Know

The Ten Lights of God is a series of eighty-one poems in which Afaa Michael Weaver explores the metaphysics of human consciousness. Influenced by the language poetry of writers such as Keith Waldrop, Anne Marie Waldrop, and Peter Gale Nelson, the poet weaves the energy of his concern for the lives of African/black men into a tapestry of the Jewish kabbalah with its notion of the body and the life of God being comprised of ten sefirot or lights. The vatic reach of these poems is contextualized in notions of the human interior as its own universe, seeking life and death themselves as the bridges to the unknowable. Weaver seeks to travel the interior of lyricism itself, the nakedness of human consciousness and its own nervous arrangement, which we know as language.

Afaa Michael Weaver

Books

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