Synopses & Reviews
A finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in Poetrya collection that examines the myth and history of the prizefighter Jack Johnson The legendary Jack Johnson (18781946) was a true American creation. The child of emancipated slaves, he overcame the violent segregationism of Jim Crow, challenging white boxersand white Americato become the first African-American heavyweight world champion. The Big Smoke, Adrian Matejkas third work of poetry, follows the fighters journey from poverty to the most coveted title in sports through the multi-layered voices of Johnson and the white women he brazenly loved. Matejkas book is part historic reclamation and part interrogation of Johnsons complicated legacy, one that often misremembers the magnetic man behind the myth.
Review
" Adrian Matejka provides a profound and powerful cocktail of personal history, hip hop elegy, and inventive language, measuring a clash of emotions and cultures with fat bass lines and sharp wit. A post-soul tour de force that places pop culture in a blender."
-Kevin Young, 2008 National Poetry Series judge
Review
Praise for The Big Smoke
“Just as we finally get a grip on the volatile Jack Johnson, Adrian Matejka, in his collection of poems, The Big Smoke, gives us a man wrestling with myth. He assays a figure bigger than life, and we see a legend shaped by American history—heroic and antiheroic—that is humanized by moments of poetic exhilaration as well as downfall. This poets Jack Johnson is made of sweat, blood, and vulnerability. Unadorned and honed, the poems in The Big Smoke are seasoned with easeful authority but jaunty as the Eagle Rock.” —Yusef Komunyakaa, author of The Chameleon Couch
“In this revelatory work, Adrian Matejka makes a chamber opera out of the highly mythologized and often deeply misunderstood life of Jack Johnson. Through the virtuosic interplay of voices, Matejka forces us to interrogate our own complicity in making histories that focus on the prize fights and the flashy cars while ignoring (and perhaps abetting) the intimate struggles and losses, the cruelties occurring in the places we call home, that make the rifts in our lives and our country deepen. This is a startlingly human book whose gorgeous language never keeps us from the harder truths and myths that make and unmake all of us.” —Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of Apocalyptic Swing
Synopsis
A finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in Poetry acollection that examines the myth and history of the prizefighter Jack JohnsonThe legendary Jack Johnson (1878 1946) was a true American creation. The child of emancipated slaves, he overcame the violent segregationism of Jim Crow, challenging white boxers and white America to become the first African-American heavyweight world champion. The Big Smoke, Adrian Matejka s third work of poetry, follows the fighter s journey from poverty to the most coveted title in sports through the multi-layered voices of Johnson and the white women he brazenly loved. Matejka s book is part historic reclamation and part interrogation of Johnson s complicated legacy, one that often misremembers the magnetic man behind the myth.
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Synopsis
Selected for the 2008 National Poetry Series by Kevin Young
The poems in Adrian Matejka's second collection, Mixology, shapeshift through the myriad meanings of "mixing" to explore and explode ideas of race, skin politics, appropriation, and cultural identity. Whether the focus of the individual poems is musical, digital, or historical, the otherness implicit in being of more than one racial background guides Matejka's work to the inevitable conclusion that all things-no matter how disparate-are parts of the whole.
About the Author
Adrian Matejka is a graduate of the Southern Illinois University Carbondale MFA program. The author of
The Devil’s Garden and
Mixology, his work has appeared in the
American Poetry Review, the
Crab Orchard Review, and
Prairie Schooner. He teaches creative writing and English literature at Indiana University.