Full name: Faster Than Light: New and Selected Poems, 1996-2011

Author: Marilyn Nelson Year: 2012 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Poetry Purchase/reserch links: Amazon Goodreads LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780807147344 0807147346

Conjuring numerous voices and characters across oceans and centuries, Faster Than Light explores widely disparate experiences through the lens of traditional poetic forms. This volume contains a selection of Marilyn Nelson s new and uncollected poems as well as work from each of her lyric histories of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century African American individuals and communities, and The Cachoeira Tales, a long riff on Chaucer s Canterbury Tales. Poems include the stories of historical figures like Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old boy lynched in 1955, and the inhabitants of Seneca Village, an African American community razed in 1857 for the creation of Central Park. Bivouac in a Storm tells the story of a group of young soldiers, later to become known as the Tuskegee Airmen, as they trained near Biloxi, Mississippi, marching in summer heat / thick as blackstrap molasses, under trees / haunted by whippings. Later pieces range from the poet s travels in Africa, Europe, and Polynesia, to poems written in collaboration with Father Jacques de Foiard Brown, a former Benedictine monk who becomes the subject of Nelson s playful fictional fantasy sequence, Adventure-Monk Both personal and historical, these poems are grounded in quotidian detail but reach toward spiritual and moral truths. Similar books: The Fields of Praise by Marilyn Nelson Magnificat by Marilyn Nelson The Complete Poems by Elizabeth Bishop Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost Crush by Richard Siken Citizen by Claudia Rankine Pillow Thoughts by Courtney Peppernell In My Head by J. M. Storm I Heard God Laughing by Hafiz Devotions by Mary Oliver Thirst by Mary Oliver Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver A Poet's Glossary by Edward Hirsch Counting Descent by Clint Smith Dead Man's Float by Jim Harrison Adam Robison and Other Poems by Adam Robinson Without by Donald Hall Winter Morning Walks by Ted Kooser Alma, or The Dead Women by Alice Notley Darkness Spoken by Ingeborg Bachmann