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Komunyakaa’s vision of the poem as a `distilled insinuation’ is honoured and intensified in this graceful and sensual verse, whose vigorous myth-making only heightens the political and social realities it often addresses. Scandalize My Name introduces a poet of great versatility and singular commitment, one whose eye remains steady where others have turned away.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49574627344657,"sku":"GOR003011047","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0330490788.jpg?v=1751038706"},{"product_id":"dien-cai-dau-book-yusef-komunyakaa-9780819511645","title":"Dien Cai Dau","description":"Poetry that precisely conjures images of the war in Vietnam by an award-winning author.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49593705464081,"sku":"GOR008124598","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49898707517713,"sku":"CIN0819511641G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49961872228625,"sku":"CIN0819511641VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008372801809,"sku":"NIN9780819511645","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0819511641.jpg?v=1750882950"},{"product_id":"neon-vernacular-book-yusef-komunyakaa-9780819512116","title":"Neon Vernacular","description":"An award-winning poet's testimony of the war in Vietnam.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49710928101649,"sku":"CIN0819512117G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50555288453393,"sku":"GOR007365535","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50665800204561,"sku":"CIN0819512117VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50914022719761,"sku":"CIN0819512117A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008525467921,"sku":"NIN9780819512116","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51395931078929,"sku":"GOR006407721","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0819512117.jpg?v=1750882951"},{"product_id":"blue-notes-book-yusef-komunyakaa-9780472066513","title":"Blue Notes","description":"Blue Notes offers an assortment of poet Yusef Komunyakaa's writing on contemporary poetry and music. The book is arranged in four sections. The first gathers essays on the work of poets and blues and jazz musicians influential to Komunyakaa's work, from Langston Hughes and Etheridge Knight to Ma Rainey and Thelonious Monk; the second collects a gallery of Komunyakaa's poems and the poet's commentary about each of them. The third selects interviews that reveal the development of the poet's aesthetic sensibility. The final section consists of four artistic explorations that reflect the poet's current interests. Two of of these texts, \"Tenebrae\" and \"Buddy's Monologue,\" have been recently performed. As editor Radiclani Clytus makes clear in the volume's introductory essay, although Komunyakaa's poetry has its roots in the stylistic innovations of early twentieth-century American modernists, his writing often reflects his understanding that a \"black\" experience should not particularize the presentation of one's art. This volume, according to the editor, is an attempt to understand Komunyakaa's critical eclecticism within the context of his own words. Yusef Komunyakaa's books of poetry include I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, Magic City, Thieves of Paradise, and Neon Vernacular, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 1994.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49851904622865,"sku":"CIN047206651XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50797037289745,"sku":"CIN047206651XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/047206651X.jpg?v=1750911342"},{"product_id":"magic-city-book-yusef-komunyakaa-9780819512086","title":"Magic City","description":"Komunyakaa vividly evokes his childhood in Bogalusa, Louisiana, once a center of Klan activity, and later a focus of Civil Rights efforts. 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Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth brings together selected poems from the past twenty years of Yusef Komunyakaa's work, as well as new poems from the Pulitzer Prize winner. His masterful, concise verse conjures arresting images of peace and war, the natural power of the earth and of love, his childhood in the American South and his service in Vietnam, the ugly violence of racism in America, and the meaning of power and morality.   The new poems in this collection add a new refrain to the jazz-inflected rhythms of one of our \"most significant and individual voices\" (David Wojahn, Poetry). Komunyakaa writes of a young man fashioning a slingshot, workers who \"honor the Earth by opening shine \/ inside the soil,\" and the sounds of a saxophone filling a dim lounge in New Jersey. 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A god isn't worth\u003cbr\u003e A drop of water in the hell of his good\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Imagination, if we can't curse\u003cbr\u003e Sunsets \u0026amp; threaten to forsake him\u003cbr\u003e In his storehouse of belladonna,\u003cbr\u003e Tiger hornets, \u0026amp; snakebites.\u003cbr\u003e --from \"Meditations in a Swine Yard\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e No turn in any life cycle is taboo as Yusef Komunyakaa examines the primal rituals shared by insects, animals, human beings, and deities in \u003ci\u003eTalking Dirty to the Gods\u003c\/i\u003e. From \"Hearsay\" to \"Heresy,\" these 132 poems, each consisting of four quatrains, are framed by innuendo and lively satire. Komunyakaa looks to nature and configures his own paradigm, in which an event as commonplace as the jewel wasp laying an egg in a cockroach becomes every bit as grand as Zeus's infidelity. The formally rigorous collection is itself a design for a systematic cosmos, a world compressed but abundant in surprise and delight.\u003c\/p\u003e a world compressed but abundant in surprise and delight.a world compressed but abundant in surprise and delight.a world compressed but abundant in surprise and delight.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49975813865745,"sku":"CIN0374527938VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50122585604369,"sku":"GOR008634463","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50135705977105,"sku":"CIN0374527938G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51001791119633,"sku":"NIN9780374527938","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0374527938.jpg?v=1751423114"},{"product_id":"thieves-of-paradise-book-yusef-komunyakaa-9780819563309","title":"Thieves of Paradise","description":"Centering on the disorienting experiences of the returning soldier and drawing on multiple traditions, Yusef Komunyakaa's poetry is potent, live, and, like the strains of jazz running through it, an erudite and soulful music.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50127309504785,"sku":"CIN0819563307VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52116811317521,"sku":"CIN0819563307G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0819563307.jpg?v=1751233476"},{"product_id":"pleasure-dome-book-yusef-komunyakaa-9780819564252","title":"Pleasure Dome","description":"Best known for Neon Vernacular, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994, and for Dien Cai Dau, a collection of poems chronicling his experiences as a journalist in Vietnam, Yusef Komunyakaa has become one of America's most compelling poets. Pleasure Dome gathers the poems in these two distinguished books and five others--over two and a half decades of Komunyakaa's work. In addition, Pleasure Dome includes 25 early, uncollected poems and a rich selection of 18 new poems.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50269844472081,"sku":"CIN0819564257G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51535508013329,"sku":"CIN0819564257VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":52736727351569,"sku":"CIN0819564257A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0819564257.jpg?v=1750914606"},{"product_id":"everyday-mojo-songs-of-earth-book-yusef-komunyakaa-9780374600136","title":"Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth","description":"New and selected poems from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet  These songs run along dirt roads \u0026amp; highways, crisscross lonely seas \u0026amp; scale mountains, traverse skies \u0026amp; underworlds of neon honkytonk, Wherever blues dare to travel.  Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth brings together selected poems from the past twenty years of Yusef Komunyakaa's work, as well as new poems from the Pulitzer Prize winner. Komunyakaa's masterful, concise verse conjures arresting images of peace and war, the natural power of the earth and of love, his childhood in the American South and his service in Vietnam, the ugly violence of racism in America, and the meaning of power and morality.  The new poems in this collection add a new refrain to the jazz-inflected rhythms of one of our \"most significant and individual voices\" (David Wojahn, Poetry). Komunyakaa writes of a young man fashioning a slingshot, workers who \"honor the Earth by opening shine \/ inside the soil,\" and the sounds of a saxophone filling a dim lounge in New Jersey. 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But Ulysses (or his half brother) is but one of the beguiling guises Komunyakaa dons over the course of this densely lyrical book. Here his speaker observes a doomed court jester; here he is with Napoleon, as the emperor \"tells the doctor to cut out his heart \/ \u0026amp; send it to the empress, Marie-Louise\"; here he is at the circus, observing as \"The strong man presses six hundred pounds, \/ his muscles flexed for the woman \/ whose T-shirt says, \u003ci\u003ethese guns are loaded\u003c\/i\u003e\"; and here is just a man, placing \"a few red anemones \/ \u0026amp; a sheaf of wheat\" on Mahmoud Darwish's grave, reflecting on why \"I'd rather die a poet \/ than a warrior.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Through these mutations and migrations and permutations and peregrinations there are constants: Komunyakaa's jazz-inflected rhythms; his effortlessly surreal images; his celebration of natural beauty and of love. There is also his insistent inquiry into the structures and struggles of power: not only of, say, king against jester but of man against his own desire and of the present against the pernicious influence of the past.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50615013998865,"sku":"GOR014013239","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51415731044625,"sku":"CIN0374147833G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52399025586449,"sku":"CIN0374147833VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0374147833.jpg?v=1751260101"},{"product_id":"night-animals-book-yusef-komunyakaa-9781946448583","title":"Night Animals","description":"The poems in \u003ci\u003eNight Animals\u003c\/i\u003e, by Yusef Komunyakaa, climb so deeply into the being of various beasts, from cricket to leopard to snowy owl, that we read them with an uncanny shiver of recognition. Without ever fully abandoning his human skin, Komunyakaa inhabits both the outer and inner lives of these creatures. The images are a brilliant match for the poems, each of Rachel Bliss's surreal animals populate a realm somewhere between our two species--birds with teeth, men with antlers, a duck wearing suspenders. Both image and word are dense and dark, intensely focused around a kind of hunger. The poet has been startling us with his rich, disturbing, and important poems for many years. \u003ci\u003eNight Animals\u003c\/i\u003e extends Yusef Komunyakaa's remarkable oeuvre.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51058389156113,"sku":"NIN9781946448583","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51333326962961,"sku":"CIN1946448583VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51743427526929,"sku":"CIN1946448583G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1946448583.jpg?v=1751219275"},{"product_id":"chameleon-couch-book-yusef-komunyakaa-9780374120382","title":"The Chameleon Couch","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA \u003ci\u003eBoston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e Best Poetry Book of 2011 | Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eAn intimate collection from one of America's most important poets\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The latest collection from one of our preeminent poets, \u003ci\u003eThe Chameleon Couch\u003c\/i\u003e is also one of Yusef Komunyakaa's most personal to date. As in his breakthrough work, \u003ci\u003eCopacetic\u003c\/i\u003e, Komunyakaa writes again of music as muse--from a blues club in the East Village to the shakuhachi of Basho. Beginning with \"Canticle,\" this varied new collection often returns to the idea of poem as hymn, ethereal and haunting, as Komunyakaa reveals glimpses of memory, myth, and violence. With contemplations that spring up along walks or memories conjured by the rhythms of New York, Komunyakaa pays tribute more than ever before to those who came before him.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The book moves seamlessly across cultural and historical boundaries, evoking Komunyakaa's capacity for cultural excavation, through artifact and place. \u003ci\u003eThe Chameleon Couch\u003c\/i\u003e begins in and never fully leaves the present--an urban modernity framed, brilliantly, in pastoral-minded verse. The poems seek the cracks beneath the landscape, whether New York or Ghana or Poland, finding in each elements of wisdom or unexpected beauty. The collection is sensually, beautifully relaxed in rhetoric; in poems like \"Cape Coast Castle,\" Komunyakaa reminds us of his gift for combining the personal with the universal, one moment addressing a lover, the next moving the focus outward, until both poet and reader are implicated in the book's startling world.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51326819893521,"sku":"CIN0374120382VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51422702371089,"sku":"CIN0374120382G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0374120382.jpg?v=1750697112"},{"product_id":"emperor-of-water-clocks-book-yusef-komunyakaa-9780374536572","title":"The Emperor of Water Clocks","description":"If I am not Ulysses, l am \/ his dear, ruthless half-brother.\" So announces Yusef Komunyakaa early in his lush new collection, The Emperor of Water Clocks. And Ulysses (or his half-brother) is but one of the characters Komunyakaa conjures over the course of this densely lyrical book. Here his speaker observes a doomed court jester; here another recalls Napoleon as the emperor \"tells the doctor to cut out his heart \/ \u0026amp; send it to the empress, Marie-Louise\"; and here he is just a man, reflecting on why he'd \"rather die a poet \/ than a warrior.\" Through these mutations and migrations and permutations and peregrinations, there are constants: Komunyakaa's jazz inflected rhythms, his effortlessly surreal images, his celebration of natural beauty and of love. There is also his insistent inquiry into the structures and struggles of power: not only, say, of king against jester but of man against his own desire, and of the present against the pernicious influence of the past. Another brilliant collection from the man David Wojahn has called one of our \"most significant and individual voices,\" The Emperor of Water Clocks delights, challenges, and satisfies.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51333035294993,"sku":"CIN0374536570G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51383225581841,"sku":"NIN9780374536572","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52595967623441,"sku":"NLS9780374536572","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52816435216657,"sku":"CIN0374536570VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0374536570.jpg?v=1750696153"},{"product_id":"trading-riffs-to-slay-monsters-book-yusef-komunyakaa-9780374617646","title":"Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters","description":"Let's go back far as we dare to go back to that land bridge made of untrusting earth \u0026amp; ice,   to a boorish faith in our rhythm of footsteps, the fleeting mantra of wordless dreams . . .   So begins Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters, the collaborative work of an elder statesman of American poetry and a young emerging poet. In early 2020, Yusef Komunyakaa and Laren McClung began a conversation in verse that carried them through the COVID pandemic. 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