Bouquet of Hungers

by Dargan, Kyle

• ISBN13: 9780820330310
• ISBN10: 0820330310
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-10-25
• Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr

Summary

Kyle Dargan's new collection of poetry reflects his many passions as a poet, his deep engagament with what it means to work in the African American literary tradition, and his lively voice, infused with hip-hop sensibility and idiom. Skillfully blending vernacular and elegant diction, his clipped and reflective phrasings create animated poems that take on a myriad of concerns. Moving through such subjects as a midnight wait in the Washington, D.C., bus station, men on exhibit at the 1904 World's Fair, the sights and sounds of an Indiana karaoke bar, and an imagined escaped slave turned to stone, Dargan's work continually shifts lenses to examine an America increasingly stifled by dogmas and inept social categories. At the core of the book is compassion for the individuals who populate it, and from that compassion grows a hunger for the old identities, in which we encase ourselves, to come undone.From "Palinode, Once Removed": The day we pursue metaphor, I will / teach them about the brain--how there is a center / to catch discrepancy between the expected / and the perceived. Stimulate the mechanism. / you are working in metaphor. / Though surprising / I am not a metaphor. This is: I am a period, / small and dark. If you read me correctly, / you are to stop. Pause. Breathe.

Author Biography

Kyle Dargan’s first book, The Listening, was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2003. He received his MFA as a Yusef Komunyakaa Fellow at Indiana University and is currently a Distinguished Adjunct in Residence on the creative writing faculty at American University. He is also managing editor of the journal Callaloo.

Table of Contents

Old school playa to new school fool : an author's note
Ars poetica	p. 1
Semiotics or after the gangs came from the west	p. 5
Screen test, 1965	p. 7
"The heart is the philosopher's stone"	p. 8
Recurring dream of my twenties	p. 10
Vagrant song	p. 11
Eye 1 / eye 2	p. 12
The exhibit : 1904 world's fair	p. 13
Boarding points	p. 17
Flashback : invitational	p. 20
Flashback : background noise	p. 22
Protest footage feat. Suggestions for the president's daughter	p. 23
Edgar the security guard on poetry	p. 24
George Carlin says	p. 26
Jetsam	p. 28
Untitled	p. 30
Karaoke	p. 31
Newark boy assesses tornado damage, weeks removed	p. 32
Authors are not their texts	p. 33
Flashback : wax	p. 34
Assembly hall	p. 35
Grace on thee	p. 38
Palinode, once removed	p. 39
Letter home II	p. 40
The father	p. 41
Still life w/ president, wreath, and unknown soldier	p. 42
Orange	p. 43
Quagmire	p. 45
Dukkha	p. 49
Every end	p. 50
The calling	p. 51
Sex ed	p. 52
Censorship psalm	p. 53
Emaciation	p. 54
Sermon	p. 55
Elegy for "the fair one"	p. 59
Tour	p. 60
Caliban	p. 61
Eye wading	p. 63
Letter home I	p. 64
Train dialogue	p. 65
Shade tree	p. 66
Sightseeing I : Prefab	p. 67
Shedding a pimp	p. 68
Boy dies falling	p. 69
Sightseeing II	p. 70
Notice : to the addict who robbed us on a landscaping job	p. 74
Folk [affirmativeambivalence]	p. 75
1980	p. 76
Tesserae	p. 77
Phat : a metadiscourse on the value of canonizing the round (spheropygian), broad (platypygous), and bulging (pleopygian) buttocks (with a resistance to such speech)	p. 79
McCollards	p. 81
Martin Luther King, Jr., and his family : paper dolls	p. 83
Piccolo Black Art	p. 87
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.