Talking Dirty to the Gods by Yusef Komunyakaa

Talking Dirty to the Gods by Yusef Komunyakaa

A daredevil poetic achievement from a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Yusef Komunyakaa's Talking Dirty to the Gods was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award

. . . A god isn't worth
A drop of water in the hell of his good

Imagination, if we can't curse
Sunsets & threaten to forsake him
In his storehouse of belladonna,
Tiger hornets, & snakebites.
--from "Meditations in a Swine Yard"

No turn in any life cycle is taboo as Yusef Komunyakaa examines the primal rituals shared by insects, animals, human beings, and deities in Talking Dirty to the Gods. 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.

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.

Born in the rural community of Bogalusa, Louisiana, YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA served in Vietnam as a correspondent and editor of The Southern Cross and received a Bronze Star for his service as a journalist. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Colorado in 1975, completed his master's degree in 1978 at Colorado State University and earned an M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine in 1980. The author of nine collections of poetry, Komunyakaa won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Prize for his book Neon Vernacular (Wesleyan, 1994). He has also been awarded the Thomas Forcade Award, the William Faulkner Prize, the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, the Hanes Poetry Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1999, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and was awarded the Shelley Memorial Prize by the Poetry Society of America. Komunyakaa has taught at Indiana State University, Washington University, University of California at Berkeley, and the University of New Orleans, and is currently Professor in the Council of Humanities and Creative Writing at Princeton University.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780374527938
ISBN 10	0374527938
Title	Talking Dirty to the Gods
Author	Yusef Komunyakaa
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Pan Macmillan South Africa
Year published	2002-04-08
Number of pages	144
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.