Yusef Komunyakaa – författare

Traverse the Earth''s soul in Yusef Komunyakaa''s powerful new collection of poetry"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 free 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). This acclaimed African American poet 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

A witty and searching collaborative poetic work composed during the pandemic. Let's go back far as we dareto go back to that land bridgemade of untrusting earth & ice,to a boorish faith in our rhythmof footsteps, the fleeting mantraof wordless dreams . . . So begins Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters, the collaborative work of an elder statesman of American poetry and a young emerging poet. In early 2020, Yusef Komunyakaa and Laren McClung began a conversation in verse that carried them through the COVID pandemic. The result is a work that is at once a document of the poets' inner and outer worlds and also a single and singular vision of what it is to live now and to look back on the epic scale of human history and artistic expression that stretches over millennia.