Sign-In
Cart
Whatsaid Serif
Paperback
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
ISBN13: 9780872863415
Publisher: City Lights Books
Published: Jan 1 1998
Pages: 126
Weight: 0.41
Height: 0.38 Width: 5.62 Depth: 8.95
Language: English
Whatsaid Serif, Nathaniel Mackey's third book of poems, is comprised of installments sixteen through thirty-five of Song of the Andoumboulou, an ongoing serial work whose first fifteen installments appear in Eroding Witness and School of Udhra, his two previous books. Named after a Dogon funeral song whose raspy tonalities prelude rebirth, Song of the Andoumboulou has from its inception tracked interweavings of lore and livid apprehension, advancing this weave as its own sort of rasp. These twenty new installments evoke the what-sayer of Kakapalo storying practice as a figure for the rough texture of such interweaving. Mackey has suggested that the Andoumboulou, a failed, earlier form of human being in Dogon cosmology, are a rough draft of human being, that the Andoumboulou are in fact us; we're the rough draft. The song is of possibility, yet to be fulfilled, aspiration's putative angel itself.
Nathaniel Mackey's poem is a brilliant renewal of and experiment with the language of our spiritual condition and a measure of what poetry gives in trust--'heat's/mean' and the rush of language to bear it.--Robin Blaser
Mackey's raspy rebus-like cultural resurfacings are both beautiful to read and worthy of repeated efforts at comprehension.--Publishers Weekly
Nathaniel Mackey, recipient of a 1993 Whiting Writers' Award, is the author of School of Udhra and Atet A.D., both also published by City Lights Publishers. He won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2006, was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2014, and won Yale's Bollingen Prize for American Poetry in 2015. He teaches a poetry workshop at Duke University.
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Alighieri, Dante
Pitavy, Francois
Paperback
Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (by the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
Carson, Anne
Paperback
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (by the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
Carson, Anne
Paperback
Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (by the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
Carson, Anne
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lao Tzu
Paperback