Golden Ax (Penguin Poets) - Softcover

Buch 53 von 156: Penguin Poets

Cortez, Rio

 
9780143137139: Golden Ax (Penguin Poets)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0143137131 ISBN 13: 9780143137139
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry
Longlisted for the 2023 PEN Open Book Award
Finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award

“Outstanding . . . the poetry in these pages is intelligent, lyrical, as invested in the past as the present and future with witty nods to pop culture.” —Roxane Gay, author of Hunger
 
“I’ve never read anything like it. Truly a sublime experience.” —Jason Reynolds, author of Ain’t Burned All the Bright

A groundbreaking collection about Afropioneerism past and present from Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and New York Times bestselling author Rio Cortez

From a visionary writer praised for her captivating work on Black history and experience comes a poetry collection exploring personal, political, and artistic frontiers, journeying from her family's history as "Afropioneers" in the American West to shimmering glimpses of transcendent, liberated futures. 
 
In poems that range from wry, tongue-in-cheek observations about contemporary life to more nuanced meditations on her ancestors—some of the earliest Black pioneers to settle in the western United States after Reconstruction—Golden Ax invites readers to re-imagine the West, Black womanhood, and the legacies that shape and sustain the pursuit of freedom.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, Rio Cortez is the New York Times bestselling author of The ABCs of Black History (Workman, 2020) and I Have Learned to Define a Field As a Space Between Mountains, winner of the 2015 Toi Dericotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. Her honors include a Poets & Writers Amy Award, as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, Canto Mundo, The Jerome Foundation, and Poet’s House. Rio holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Far Enough

Byrdie Lee Howell Langon self-published Utah and the Early Black Settlers, a short book about her life and the Black community in Salt Lake City, Utah, and was honored with these words by her Bethel AME pastor, Jerry Ford, in 1969:

We say we love you

not only for what you are

but for what you are

when we are with you

we love you

for putting your hand

into our heaped-up hearts

and passing over

all the frivolous and weak things

that you cannot help

but see there

and drawing out

all the beautiful things

that many

have not looked far enough

to find

Covered Wagon as Spaceship

Standing unseen in the little bluestem,

curious and not quite used to living,

I consider whether it's aliens

that brought Black folks to the canyons, valley.

Standing in the great evaporation

of a lake, holy dandelion for

eyes, full and white and searching the landscape

for understanding: how do you come

to be where there are no others, except

science fiction? I am a child feeling

extraterrestrial; whose history, untold,

is not enough. Anyway, it begins with abduction

UFO, for Instance

When the hole between blue spruce widens

and twists into a cosmos              when the wild

lilac and campfire atomize           and night hangs their smokes

across its belly   when in the clearing you are certain

you are not lonelier         but there is a lifting in you

where other knowing rises too   and divides you from the bone

in your feet to the fat     round your heart and leaves you

surrounded by your own              breath you emerge from

and watch vanish and think          the night ate it ate your knowing and how

could anyone know any more     you might as well look out

into the clouds of long pine that hang     brambled and

orange in branches          you listen for howling but none comes

North Node

According to her, I appeared to my mother in an in utero vision and told her my name. Before I chose my mother, all day long I ran my fingertips along the slick backs of cutthroat trout and gathered water from Millcreek into a sapphire pail. I waited for her. In the distance, there was a blue bull surrounded by lilies.


She loves me, so she bore me underwater. IÕm here to learn a lesson. I spent my other lives in the Nevada desert, where I only did what felt good. What could that mean? I reconcile the pleasure in lying naked on the hot sand of the Mojave, watching the braided muscles in a horseÕs hind legs with the ocean nowhere, a frying chest on the hood of an idle car. So comes a lesson, IÕm here to cut the scorpion from my throat. Even though it has dragged me through sweet darkness and time. Even now, in the stillness of home, in love and full of wine, it wraps its eight legs around me. Even through the lilies, it sets its many eyes on me and, suddenly, longing

Like a Suggestion

The antelope start dying,

of all places, on Antelope

Island. Our two greyhounds

startle in their sleep and walk

together toward the window.

I've heard wolves are hunting

bison, even though it's spring

and there are easier things to kill.

Cowbirds abandon wooden

fences. They say Atlantic salmon

haven't returned to their cribs

of fresh water. The cat stands still

before an open door to the house.

I move to put my hand behind

her ear and she bolts.

I Have Learned to Define a Field as a Space between Mountains

If I remember a field where I stroked the velvety hound's-tongue and cracked its purple mouth from stem and it is not a memory, then what were the limits of the field?


Sometimes we are driving south toward Zion in a crowded truck with my mother and we pass the same red wildflowers until someone says, ÒIndian paintbrush, Rio, havenÕt you seen them before?Ó And, have I?


Other times I pose in front of giant flor de maga, its soft petal saucers larger than my head. My father fixes one behind my ear and says something in Eyeri but for what photograph? I am a conjoined hibiscus-headed twin, except IÕm local.


I braid the long hair of the willow and like a young warrior I swing across the canal bed by the braid. By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the willow trees, we hung our harps. How could we sing the LordÕs song in a foreign land? I read this once in Sunday school, tripping on it.


In any field I am certain I can be seen by someone. How couldnÕt I? When IÕm blood-divided one hundred ways, when I pray to the God called DO NOT BOARD THE SHIP, when IÕm protected by so many masters of the vine. They must be in here somewhere? They must see me this far into the desert, it canÕt be that I am alone here. I search behind the cattails, I scramble the wood. Has it gotten darker?


A child and all I can see are houses. Every house is a rambler with a plastic snake full of sand or a well that isnÕt really a well. Every house is on a street named after the Ute tribes. IÕm in Ute Country, in the field to fly a cheap kite, but it gets caught in pine sap. I walk home but not without pocketfuls.

The Idea of Ancestry

After Etheridge Knight

I am in a sweet place

standing in Millcreek

on a road

in its canyon

and this sweet place

has also been the sweet place

of my people

I am staring

into the water

my grandmother fished

with a rod and a line

I am standing

near the head

of a timber trail

felled by grandfather's

grandfather

I am listening

to the aspen

its green coins

singing in the wind

and I know it sang

just like this

for them

I am standing

right at the center

of its singing

the same sound

heard by black bears

or the calf of a moose

lying even sweeter

in the yarrow

showing we can be dark

and shining in wildflower

I know this timber

was once a house

my mother's grandmother's

mother's hammer in hand

everything

throttling backward

toward me

through time

a timber roof

that has kept the frost

from coming in

and stinging my babies

we made that

for ourselves

I consider choosing

there are times

when it is a joy

to remember

I like to think about my people

drinking fresh buttermilk

from the chosen farms

of their other people

all of us gazing

back at the house

framed by our future knowing

filling up on fresh tomatoes

and after

maybe lying like the silk calf

in the deerwood and the aster

and never-ending

Driving at Night

For Laquan McDonald

I think it's quails lining the road, but it's fallen birchwood.

What look like white clouds in a grassy basin, sprinklers.

I mistake the woman walking her...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0143137131
ISBN 13 
9780143137139
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
80
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland