Part of Your America: Danez Smith and Jericho Brown
"At the end of the poem, Brown abandons the language of myth to speak directly about slavery: ‘No one has to convince us./The people of my country believe/We can’t be hurt if we can be bought.’ For Black Americans, as for Ganymede, the way to heaven, or in this case a promised land, is via violence and coercion."
viaLONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS |
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We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality.
We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world.
Black Lives Matter. |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Kazim Ali on "When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me"
"Writing Devi’s poems into English—I guess I mostly believe that Benjamin was right: even the original poem is a ‘translation’ of an experience past language—made me a writer of poems nothing like the poems I myself wrote. They were poems of great despair, of great rage, emotions ordinarily thought of perhaps as ‘negative;’ certainly they were emotions and feelings that I myself was only just beginning to explore in my own work." |
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