Evie Shockley

Poetry that acts as a fierce and loving resistance to violence

Semiautomatic

the new black (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

A profound and uplifting meditation on the meanings of race and belonging in America

The New Black

Ed Pavlic

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Ladan Osman

Original poetry, fiction, and cultural criticism explore issues of trust, bridge-building, difference, and betrayal, both political and private. How do we know who is on our side? Is it possible for someone who is not like us to share our hopes? Can links forged by empathy or mutual interest match those created by shared experience? What can we gain from alliances that we cannot achieve on our own? These are difficult question to answer even in intimate settings, and more so in arenas of cultural and political struggle. Through original poetry, fiction, and cultural criticism from both established writers and newcomers, Allies offers unique insights into issues of trust, bridge-building, difference, and betrayal. Drawing on the prophetic power of the imagination to conjure both the possible dangers and life-giving possibilities of alliances—be they political, private (such as marriage), therapeutic, or even aesthetic (between readers and writers, for example)—Allies will be essential reading for our times. Allies is the first publication of Boston Review's newly inaugurated Arts in Society department. A radical revisioning of the magazine's poetry and fiction, the department unites them—along with cultural criticism and belles lettres—into a project that explores how the arts can speak directly to the most pressing political and civic concerns of our age, from growing inequality to racial and gender regimes, a disempowered electorate, and a collapsing natural world. Fiction Samuel Delay, Tananarive Due, Catherine Taylor Poetry Jane Miller, Ru Puro, Emilia Nielsen, Sarah Vap, Rachel Levitsky, Tess Liem Interviews Walter Johnson and Tef Poe, Robin D. G. Kelley and Vijay Iyer Essays Roderick Ferguson, Micki McEyla, Mark Nowak, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Abdullah Taïa

Allies

Beginning with a deceptively simple question—What do we mean when we designate behaviors, values, or forms of expression as “black”?—Evie Shockley’s Renegade Poetics separates what we think we know about black aesthetics from the more complex and nuanced possibilities the concept has long encompassed. The study reminds us, first, that even among the radicalized young poets and theorists who associated themselves with the Black Arts Movement that began in the mid-1960s, the contours of black aesthetics were deeply contested and, second, that debates about the relationship between aesthetics and politics for African American artists continue into the twenty-first century. Shockley argues that a rigid notion of black aesthetics commonly circulates that is little more than a caricature of the concept. She sees the Black Aesthetic as influencing not only African American poets and their poetic production, but also, through its shaping of criteria and values, the reception of their work. Taking as its starting point the young BAM artists’ and activists’ insistence upon the interconnectedness of culture and politics, this study delineates how African American poets—in particular, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Harryette Mullen, Anne Spencer, Ed Roberson, and Will Alexander—generate formally innovative responses to their various historical and cultural contexts. Out of her readings, Shockley eloquently builds a case for redefining black aesthetics descriptively, to account for nearly a century of efforts by African American poets and critics to name and tackle issues of racial identity and self-determination. In the process, she resituates innovative poetry that has been dismissed, marginalized, or misread because its experiments were not “recognizably black”—or, in relation to the avant-garde tradition, because they were.

Evie Shockley

Books

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