Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Waiting for Sweet Betty

Waiting for Sweet Betty

Major, Clarence

Paperback

Black American StudiesGeneral Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1556591799
ISBN13: 9781556591792
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Published: Oct 1 2002
Pages: 120
Weight: 0.37
Height: 0.34 Width: 5.50 Depth: 9.18
Language: English

I find myself writing poems about things I can't paint, writes Clarence Major who, for 40 years, has been viewed by critics as a polymorphous writer who has been iconoclast, black esthetician, modernist, surrealist, postmodernist, and deconstructionist (World Literature Today).

In Waiting for Sweet Betty, Major watches the world with careful longing to capture the exchanges and conflicts between person and place. Just as a painter juxtaposes colors and shapes, Major does the same with words, often writing as an outsider in foreign places. He shifts perspective away from the self, allowing words to play off one another subtly--with puns, inverted/subverted cliches, and sweet bop soundings--so that his vision might become anyone's. His subtle, conversational style, is at once humble, playful, humorous, and studied, and his stories can be seen as well as heard:

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