Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Major Jackson wants art to 'Blow / back the ordinary / jive of planet Earth,' and his new poems roil and buckle, skitter and swerve, clot and spill out into the world. is his fourth and best book; his voice seems to have broken loose, allowing for all manner of praise and lament, for observation and meditation, the grim and the goofball, and for outbreaks of pure sorcery, where 'punctuation is my jury and the moon is my judge.'" Mark Doty
Review
"Major Jackson's fourth collection of poetry, , juxtaposes the physical and the metaphysical, the external and the internal where the landscape and the mind of the poet converge until time bends. The imagery travels through a timely multiplicity, always surefooted and attuned, but never outdistancing the natural truth in this cosmopolitan voice. The poet writes the world he encounters, and imagines, with playfully deep interplay. The music in the language of is seductively straightforward, and each body-brain poem here puts genius squarely on the line." Yusef Komunyakaa
Synopsis
In his fourth collection, a breakthrough volume, Major Jackson appropriates the vernacular notion of rolling deep to capture the spirit of aesthetic travel that defines these forceful new poems and brazenly announces his steady accretion of literary and artistic influences, both formal and experimental his crew. The confident and radiant poems in Roll Deep address a range of topics, most prominently human intimacy and war. And like his best work to date, these poems create new experiences with language owed to Jackson s willingness to once again seek a rhythmic sound that expresses the unique realities of the twenty-first century with humor and understanding. Whether set in Nairobi, Madrid, or Greece, the poems are sensuously evocative and unapologetically with-it, in their effort to build community across borders of language and style.
From Urban Renewal, The Dadaab Suite: I have come to Dadaab like an acto on a press release, unprepared for the drained face of famine-fleeing refugees, my craft s glamou dimmed by hundreds of infant graves, childre whose lolling heads final drop landed on their mothers backs like soft stones. What beauty can I spell i this swelter of dust
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Synopsis
This breakthrough volume appropriates the vernacular notion of "rolling deep" to explore human intimacy and war.
About the Author
Major Jackson