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The New Black

The New Black

A profound and uplifting meditation on the meanings of race and belonging in America 

Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (2012)

Smart, grounded, and lyrical, Evie Shockley's the new black integrates powerful ideas about "blackness," past and present, through the medium of beautifully crafted verse. the new black sees our racial past inevitably shaping our contemporary moment, but struggles to remember and reckon with the impact of generational shifts: what seemed impossible to people not many years ago--for example, the election of an African American president--will have always been a part of the world of children born in the new millennium. All of the poems here, whether sonnet, mesostic, or deconstructed blues, exhibit a formal flair. They speak to the changes we have experienced as a society in the last few decades--changes that often challenge our past strategies for resisting racism and, for African Americans, ways of relating to one another. The poems embrace a formal ambiguity that echoes the uncertainty these shifts produce, while reveling in language play that enables readers to "laugh to keep from crying." They move through nostalgia, even as they insist on being alive to the present and point longingly towards possible futures. Check for the online reader's companion at http: //http: //thenewblack.site.wesleyan.edu.

Author: Evie Shockley
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 03/15/2012
Pages: 128
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 9.40h x 6.80w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9780819572875

About the Author
EVIE SHOCKLEY is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University and the author of a half-red sea, the chapbook The Gorgon Goddess, and Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry.

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