Necessary Past
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A. Van Jordan
A01=Annette Debo
African American
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
American history
Author_Annette Debo
automatic-update
Black
Camille Dungy
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBH
Category=DSBJ
Category=DSC
Category=HBJK
Category=NHK
contemporary
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
Elizabeth Alexander
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=0
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Frank X Walker
historical poem
Kevin Young
Language_English
MACNOLIA
Michael S. Harper
Natasha Trethewey
Native Guard
PA=Available
Poetry
postcolonial
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
Rita Dove
Robert Hayden
softlaunch
Suck on the Marrow
To Repel Ghosts: The Remix
Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers
twenty-first century poetry
Venus Hottentot
Product details
- ISBN 9780810146877
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Apr 2024
- Publisher: Northwestern University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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Uncovering how poetry refigures Black history to imagine a more just present and future
“Poets are lyric historians,” proclaimed Langston Hughes. Today, historical poetry offers a lyric history necessary to our current moment—poetry with the power to correct the past, realign the present, and create a more hopeful, or even hoped-for, future. The Necessary Past: Revising History in Contemporary African American Poetry focuses on six of today’s most celebrated poets: Elizabeth Alexander, Natasha Trethewey, A. Van Jordan, Kevin Young, Frank X Walker, and Camille T. Dungy. Their works reimagine the interiority of Black historical figures like the so-called Venus Hottentot Sara Baartman and the would-be spelling champion MacNolia Cox, the African American Native Guard who fought in the Civil War and the unknown victims of domestic violence, Jack Johnson and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Medgar Evers and those freed and enslaved in the early nineteenth century. These poets shift the power dynamic in revising our shared history, reconfiguring who speaks and whose stories are told, and writing a past that frees readers to change the present and envision a more just future.
“Poets are lyric historians,” proclaimed Langston Hughes. Today, historical poetry offers a lyric history necessary to our current moment—poetry with the power to correct the past, realign the present, and create a more hopeful, or even hoped-for, future. The Necessary Past: Revising History in Contemporary African American Poetry focuses on six of today’s most celebrated poets: Elizabeth Alexander, Natasha Trethewey, A. Van Jordan, Kevin Young, Frank X Walker, and Camille T. Dungy. Their works reimagine the interiority of Black historical figures like the so-called Venus Hottentot Sara Baartman and the would-be spelling champion MacNolia Cox, the African American Native Guard who fought in the Civil War and the unknown victims of domestic violence, Jack Johnson and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Medgar Evers and those freed and enslaved in the early nineteenth century. These poets shift the power dynamic in revising our shared history, reconfiguring who speaks and whose stories are told, and writing a past that frees readers to change the present and envision a more just future.
Annette Debo is a professor of English at Western Carolina University. She is the author of The American H.D. (2012) and editor of H.D.'s Within the Walls and What Do I Love? (2014), as well as coeditor of the MLA volume Approaches to Teaching H.D.'s Poetry and Prose (2011).
