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Congotronic
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Congotronic Paperback - 2014

by Shane Book

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Reader reviews for Congotronic

From the publisher

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."

Details

  • Title Congotronic
  • Author Shane Book
  • Binding Paperback
  • Pages 80
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher University of Iowa Press, Canada
  • Publication date 2014
  • Features Bibliography
  • ISBN 9781609383077 / 1609383079
  • Weight 0.25 lbs (0.11 kg)
  • Dimensions 7.9 x 4.9 x 0.3 in (20.07 x 12.45 x 0.76 cm)
  • Category Poetry
  • Library of Congress subjects American poetry, African Americans
  • Library of Congress Catalogue Number 2014935646
  • Dewey Decimal Code 811.6

Media reviews

Citations

  • Booklist, 09/15/2014, Page 14

About the author

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.

More Copies for Sale

Congotronic: Poems

Congotronic: Poems

by Book, Shane

  • Used
  • Near Fine
  • Paperback
  • Signed
  • first
Condition
Near Fine
Edition
First U.S. Edition
Binding
Paperback
ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
9781609383077 / 1609383079
Quantity available
1
Seller
Item price
A$20.41
A$25.51 Delivery to USA

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Description:
Iowa City, Iowa, USA: University Of Iowa Press, 2014. First U.S. Edition . Soft cover. Near Fine. 68pp. Inscribed by the author on title page. Colour illustrated wrapper is clean and without wear. Binding square and tight, not creased. Small octavo:20.5 x 13cm. From the series, Kuhl House Poets, edited by Mark Levine and Emily Wilson. Shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize.
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Item price
A$20.41
A$25.51 Delivery to USA
Congotronic (Kuhl House Poets)
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Congotronic (Kuhl House Poets)

by Book, Shane

  • Used
  • Good
  • Paperback
Condition
Good
Binding
Paperback
ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
9781609383077 / 1609383079
Quantity available
1
Seller
Item price
A$57.35
Free Delivery to USA

Show details

Description:
paperback. Good. Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items. May be an ex-library book.
Add to wish list
Item price
A$57.35
Free Delivery to USA