
Tenant of Fire, The
Poems
Ryan Black(Autor*in)
University of Pittsburgh Press
Erscheint ca. am 10. September 2019
Buch
Softcover
85 Seiten
978-0-8229-6590-9 (ISBN)
Beschreibung
The Tenant of Fire is about Queens, NY-its history, public and personal, real and imagined. Many of the people who populate this book-Irish Catholics, Italian-Americans-were once considered ethnic but now fall wholly under the banner of white. And from their anxieties a man like Donald Trump emerges. Born and raised in Queens, Trump is both the product and purveyor of a localized nativist politic.
The young white speaker of these poems works to record his parents' and neighbors', both white and of color, and his own attempts at navigating a shifting landscape. In poems on the homecoming of Vietnam vets, or the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, or the firebombing of Malcolm X's house, The Tenant of Fire explores how and why the plurality of a place like Queens, where now nearly two hundred languages are spoken, is viewed as a threat to national security.
The young white speaker of these poems works to record his parents' and neighbors', both white and of color, and his own attempts at navigating a shifting landscape. In poems on the homecoming of Vietnam vets, or the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, or the firebombing of Malcolm X's house, The Tenant of Fire explores how and why the plurality of a place like Queens, where now nearly two hundred languages are spoken, is viewed as a threat to national security.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
Black offers a personal perspective on Queens, New York, in wide-gauged, acutely observed, conversational poems that often feel like stories or essays. The result is not so much nostalgia as re-creation, affording us the particularities of the setting. * Library Journal * There are books that you read, put away, and only return to when you are browsing your bookshelves, perhaps in search of another book.And there are books like Ryan Black's The Tenant of Fire that you have no choice but to sit with, think about, and go back to immediately, hoping you captured every detail. * Heavy Feather Review * Plenty of poems are written about Manhattan and Brooklyn but not many about the outer boroughs of New York City. Ryan Black's excellent poems grow from his experience of south Queens, a place of varied ethnicity and economic classes, and such landmarks as Victory Field and Forest Park. That's to say: a part of the City unknown to most tourists. -- Ed Ochester Ryan Black is an exquisite craftsman whose material, I think, is time. The sounds it makes: of a speaker losing and accumulating breath in his attempts to record a personal and familial history of Queens, New York. That record is fleeting, fugitive, shaped by, and interested in, white, racialized (and thus violatory) conditions. These elegiac, capacious poems carry conflicting assertions. They are poems of reckoning and 'awful silence.' What species of fire can such friction create? -- Aracelis Girmay Ryan Black has written poems of enormous urgency for our time: at once a blistering critique of racism and xenophobia in America, and an equally blistering critique of the high- and middle-brow condescensions that sequester us all in cultural spheres that might as well be holding cells. . . . In a dark time, mindfulness and generous connection are the only possible recourse. Death of a Nativist gives me heart. -- Linda Gregerson, from her Introduction to his chapbook Death of a NativistWeitere Details
Reihe
Sprache
Englisch
Verlagsort
Pittsburgh PA
USA
Produkt-Hinweis
Broschur/Paperback
Klebebindung
Maße
Höhe: 218 mm
Breite: 150 mm
Dicke: 8 mm
Gewicht
136 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8229-6590-9 (9780822965909)
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E-Book
08/2019
Penguin Random House South Africa
19,49 €
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Person
Ryan Black is the author of Death of a Nativist, winner of the 2016 Poetry Society of America National Chapbook Fellowship, selected by Linda Gregerson. He has published previously in AGNI, The Journal, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and