University of Iowa Press, 2014 eISBN: 978-1-60938-308-4 | Paper: 978-1-60938-307-7 Library of Congress Classification PS3602.O65745A6 2014 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
At once original, strange, funny, and unnerving, Shane Book’s Congotronic takes the reader into unstable territory, where multiple layers of voice, diction, and music collide. Some of these poems have the sparse directness of a kind of bleak prayer; others mingle the earthbound rhythms of hip-hop with the will-to-transcendence of high Romanticism.
Harnessing techniques of the cinematic and audio arts, Book’s poems splice, sample, collage, and jump-cut language from an array of sources, including slave narratives, Western philosophy, hip hop lyrics, and the diaries of plantation owners. In fusing disparate texts, each poem in this collection attempts to create a community in language. Thus, at its core, the project is utopic—or more precisely, to borrow from Duke Ellington—the project is “blutopic.”
The book’s anchoring series contains an apocryphal narrative grounded in the journey of the Middle Passage and an older mythic history from the West African epic of Sundiata. Here elements of Afrofuturism coagulate with an R&B grin as social forces challenge a sense of personhood, prompting free-jazz inflected conversations between the pieces of a shattered, polyvocal self.
Here is a world poet of the Sonic Global South sheathed in a Northern Hemispheric glow suit, high “on Coltrane, on Zeus” but also on the old and new schools of Descartes, M.I.A., Cecil Taylor, Gilbert Ryle, Freud, and Jay Z, among others—or as one poem puts it, the “aural truths.”
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Shane Book is the author of Ceiling of Sticks, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. He is also a filmmaker whose award-winning work has screened around the world in numerous film festivals and on television. He is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
REVIEWS
“Welcome to the bounding dream and song of Congotronic! This kind of visionary music will ‘leave every jaw dropped, cocked and locked.’ It’s as if John Berryman was alive in the spiral of Shane Book’s ear. These are oral, oracular, and thoroughly original poems. Anyone who enters them will be transformed.”—Terrance Hayes, author, Lighthead
“With an immediate and sustaining wit, and all fingers on the pulse of language, Shane Book seeks to blow the ghost out of the machine and the dust off of history. No mind-body split here; instead a learned, restive, blues-based exploration of poetic modes and poetic potentialities, of layered identities and polyvocal echoes.”—Michael Palmer, author, Thread
“Shane Book crosses tremendous territory—from the social through the political and the philosophical to the sheerly imaginative; it’s travel in every sense of the word, motivated by the urgency of pluralistic experience, of the imperative to witness. And to bring that witnessing to life, to speak out, which he does with a marvelous range of dictions, vernaculars, and linguistic stances—making voice an active, even acrobatic thing. He performs a stunning high-wire act that manages to remain extremely well-grounded at the same time.”—Cole Swensen, author, The Book of a Hundred Hands
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgments
African Evening
World Town
Security of the First World
Last
Pore Tune
Janelas
Mack Daddy Manifesto
The Collected Novellas of Gilbert Ryle
They Are Not Bits of Clockwork
They Are as Robinson Crusoes, Commanding
They Are Exploding Just Feet above the Desert Sands
They Cannot Be Taken to Bits
They Are Intrinsically Phosphorescent
They Are Not Motions, Suites, Cabins
They Foment a Revolt
They Have a Private Career
They Are of an Extraordinary Feral Territory
They Come Home in a Torrent of Laughter and a Nubian Eunuch-Powered Litter
The Ivorian “because because"
A Laborious Wakefulness or Was It a Most Unapologetic Whistling in the Ear
The Colony Mating Song
Bronze Age
Chinese Blow Up Doll
Freetown
Everywhere
H.N.I.C.
Flagelliforms
Flagelliform 61: Tilted away
Flagelliform 7
Flagelliform 21: Exile (“To be sure, hot water killsa man, But cold water too kills a man.”)
Flagelliform 22
Flagelliform 3
Flagelliform 45
Flagelliform 50
Flagelliform 13: Night Births
Flagelliform 19: “Snake Foot That Does Not Walk.”
Flagelliform 39: And the Name of That Spear Was, One Place Where It Enters, Nine Places Where the Blood Comes Out
Flagelliform 79
Notes
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
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Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
University of Iowa Press, 2014 eISBN: 978-1-60938-308-4 Paper: 978-1-60938-307-7
At once original, strange, funny, and unnerving, Shane Book’s Congotronic takes the reader into unstable territory, where multiple layers of voice, diction, and music collide. Some of these poems have the sparse directness of a kind of bleak prayer; others mingle the earthbound rhythms of hip-hop with the will-to-transcendence of high Romanticism.
Harnessing techniques of the cinematic and audio arts, Book’s poems splice, sample, collage, and jump-cut language from an array of sources, including slave narratives, Western philosophy, hip hop lyrics, and the diaries of plantation owners. In fusing disparate texts, each poem in this collection attempts to create a community in language. Thus, at its core, the project is utopic—or more precisely, to borrow from Duke Ellington—the project is “blutopic.”
The book’s anchoring series contains an apocryphal narrative grounded in the journey of the Middle Passage and an older mythic history from the West African epic of Sundiata. Here elements of Afrofuturism coagulate with an R&B grin as social forces challenge a sense of personhood, prompting free-jazz inflected conversations between the pieces of a shattered, polyvocal self.
Here is a world poet of the Sonic Global South sheathed in a Northern Hemispheric glow suit, high “on Coltrane, on Zeus” but also on the old and new schools of Descartes, M.I.A., Cecil Taylor, Gilbert Ryle, Freud, and Jay Z, among others—or as one poem puts it, the “aural truths.”
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Shane Book is the author of Ceiling of Sticks, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. He is also a filmmaker whose award-winning work has screened around the world in numerous film festivals and on television. He is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
REVIEWS
“Welcome to the bounding dream and song of Congotronic! This kind of visionary music will ‘leave every jaw dropped, cocked and locked.’ It’s as if John Berryman was alive in the spiral of Shane Book’s ear. These are oral, oracular, and thoroughly original poems. Anyone who enters them will be transformed.”—Terrance Hayes, author, Lighthead
“With an immediate and sustaining wit, and all fingers on the pulse of language, Shane Book seeks to blow the ghost out of the machine and the dust off of history. No mind-body split here; instead a learned, restive, blues-based exploration of poetic modes and poetic potentialities, of layered identities and polyvocal echoes.”—Michael Palmer, author, Thread
“Shane Book crosses tremendous territory—from the social through the political and the philosophical to the sheerly imaginative; it’s travel in every sense of the word, motivated by the urgency of pluralistic experience, of the imperative to witness. And to bring that witnessing to life, to speak out, which he does with a marvelous range of dictions, vernaculars, and linguistic stances—making voice an active, even acrobatic thing. He performs a stunning high-wire act that manages to remain extremely well-grounded at the same time.”—Cole Swensen, author, The Book of a Hundred Hands
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgments
African Evening
World Town
Security of the First World
Last
Pore Tune
Janelas
Mack Daddy Manifesto
The Collected Novellas of Gilbert Ryle
They Are Not Bits of Clockwork
They Are as Robinson Crusoes, Commanding
They Are Exploding Just Feet above the Desert Sands
They Cannot Be Taken to Bits
They Are Intrinsically Phosphorescent
They Are Not Motions, Suites, Cabins
They Foment a Revolt
They Have a Private Career
They Are of an Extraordinary Feral Territory
They Come Home in a Torrent of Laughter and a Nubian Eunuch-Powered Litter
The Ivorian “because because"
A Laborious Wakefulness or Was It a Most Unapologetic Whistling in the Ear
The Colony Mating Song
Bronze Age
Chinese Blow Up Doll
Freetown
Everywhere
H.N.I.C.
Flagelliforms
Flagelliform 61: Tilted away
Flagelliform 7
Flagelliform 21: Exile (“To be sure, hot water killsa man, But cold water too kills a man.”)
Flagelliform 22
Flagelliform 3
Flagelliform 45
Flagelliform 50
Flagelliform 13: Night Births
Flagelliform 19: “Snake Foot That Does Not Walk.”
Flagelliform 39: And the Name of That Spear Was, One Place Where It Enters, Nine Places Where the Blood Comes Out
Flagelliform 79
Notes
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE