Spirit Boxing
Published on 14. April 2017
112 pages
978-0-8229-8281-4 (ISBN)
Description
In Spirit Boxing, Weaver revisits his working class core. The veteran of fifteen years as a factory worker in his native Baltimore, he mines his own experience to build a wellspring of craft in poems that extend from his life to the lives that inhabit the whole landscape of the American working class. He writes with an intimacy that is unique in American poetry, and echoes previous comparisons of his oeuvre to that of Walt Whitman. The singularity of his voice resonates here through the prism of his realization of self through a lifelong project of the integration of American and Chinese culture. The work is Daoist in influence and structure as it echoes both a harmonic realization of context and the intuitive and transcendent dance of body, mind, and spirit.
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Afaa Michael Weaver
Spirit Boxing
Book
01/2017
University of Pittsburgh Press
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Person
Afaa Michael Weaver is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Timber and Prayer: The Indian Pond Poems; My Father's Geography; The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005; The Government of Nature, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award ; and City of Eternal Spring, winner of the Phyllis Wheatley Book Award. He is alumnae professor of English at Simmons College in Boston. Weaver is the recipient of an NEA fellowship, a Pew fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, and a Fulbright scholar appointment, among other honors. In 1998, he became the first Elder of the Cave Canem Foundation.
Content
- Intro
- Contents
- Preface
- Xu Bing's Flying Phoenixes
- I. Workers and Miracles
- John Henry Sleeping in High Grass
- Where the Steel of Ploughs
- Preachers
- Houses of Ice, 1969
- The Lay of Paradise, 1970
- A Baby in the Crash of '29
- Mass Production
- II. The Wheel
- Spirit Boxing
- Morning Shift
- The Good Traveler
- The Bluesman Speaks on Original Man
- Ivory Soap, a Whiteness
- The Worker We Named Freight Train & His Revelation of Ezekiel's Vision
- When They Fired Our Magician
- Knowledge of Silk
- Beatitudes, the Merciful
- Handling the Heaviness
- How to Use a Buck Knife
- Beatitudes, the Peacemakers
- When Hard Men Love Each Other
- Freight Train Returns from the Hospital
- Black Scab
- A Truck Driver from West Virginia
- The Good Job
- The Winepress
- Freight Train Watches Me Do My Taiji
- In Mencken's Neighborhood
- III. Wheels Inside Wheels
- When the Farms Give Out
- Walk On, Walk Away
- A Postscript to Giant
- Interiors, a Miner's Home
- Grabbing Lunch in the Morgue
- A Nation of Hands
- Ode to the Wheelchair
- Get on Up, Now
- Whole Cloth
- A Legacy, Southern Kin
- The Gray Mare
- Blood of a Union of States
- Mr. Fugg's Hardware Store
- Making Soldiers
- Ode to the Hard Men
- The Hipness of Hips
- IV. Coda
- Repack Room
- Where No Good Can Live
- The Architecture of Factories, 1985
- Ode to the Righteous Union
- Dear Mystical Reader
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
