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<P>Lorenzo Thomas (1944-2005) was the youngest member of the Society of Umbra, predecessor of the Black Arts Movement. The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas is the first volume to encompass his entire writing life. His poetry synthesizes New York School and Black Arts aesthetics, heavily influenced by blues and jazz. In a career that spanned decades, Thomas constantly experimented with form and subject, while still writing poetry deeply rooted in the traditions of African American aesthetics. Whether drawing from his experiences during the war in Vietnam, exploring his life in the urban north and the southwest, or parodying his beloved Negritude ancestors, Thomas was a lyric innovator.</P>

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<P>Atopia grapples with the political climate of the United States manifested through our everyday lives. Sandra Simonds charts the formations and deformations of the social and political through the observations of the poem's speakers, interspersed with the language of social media, news reports, political speech, and the dialogue of friends, children, strangers, and politicians. The Los Angeles Review of Books characterized Simonds's work as «robust, energetic, fanciful, even baroque» and «a necessary counterforce to the structures of gender, power, and labor that impinge upon contemporary life.» These poems reflect on what it means to be human, what it means to build communities within a political structure it also opposes.</P>

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<P><B>Winner of the Colorado Book Award in Poetry (2018)</B></P><P>In this fourth book in a series of award-winning survival narratives, Dungy writes positioned at a fulcrum, bringing a new life into the world even as her elders are passing on. In a time of massive environmental degradation, violence and abuse of power, a world in which we all must survive, these poems resonate within and beyond the scope of the human realms, delicately balancing between conflicting loci of attention. Dwelling between vibrancy and its opposite, Dungy writes in a single poem about a mother, a daughter, Smokin' Joe Frazier, brittle stars, giant boulders, and a dead blue whale. These poems are written in the face of despair to hold an impossible love and a commitment to hope. A readers companion will be availabe at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions.</P>

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<P><B>Winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry (2017)</B></P><P>Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae's latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book's three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love. A reader's companion is available at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions.</P>

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<P>In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship's owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert—the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves—Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten. Check for the online reader's companion at http://zong.site.wesleyan.edu.</P>

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<P>Pulitzer Prize–;winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa is well known for his jazz poetry, and this book is the first to bring together the verve and vitality of his oeuvre. The centerpiece of this volume is the libretto «Testimony.» Paying homage to Charlie Parker, «Testimony» was commissioned for a radio drama with original music by eminent Australian composer and saxophonist Sandy Evans. Remarkably rich and evocative, encompassing a wide range of musical energy and performers, this moving affirmation of Parker's genius became a milestone in contemporary radio theater. Twenty-eight additional poems spanning the breadth of Komunyakaa's career are included, including two never previously published. Accompanying the poems are interviews and essays featuring Komunyakaa, Evans, radio producer Christopher Williams, jazz critic Miriam Zolin, jazz writer and editor Sascha Feinstein, and musical director, Paul Grabowsky. Sascha Feinstein writes the foreword. The print edition includes two CDs with the entire Australian Broadcast Company recording of Testimony, ebook contains imbedded audio. Check for the online reader's companion at testimony.site.wesleyan.edu.</P>

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<P>Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure gathers four decades of poetry from a celebrated Canadian poet and translator who has persistently reconfigured the linguistic and material relations of English. Moure's poems and networked sequences are hybrid and often polylingual; they work with contradiction, paradox, and verbal detritus— linguistic hics and blips often too quickly dismissed as noise—to create new conditions for thought and pleasure. From postdramatic theatre to queer and feminist theory, from the politics of citizenship and genocide to the minutiae of digital poetics, from the clamor of love to the shadows of grief and memory, Moure has joyously toppled hierarchies of meaning and parasited dominant discourses to create poetry that crosses borders, embracing hope, not war. This volume, edited by poet and literary scholar Shannon Maguire, also features an extensive introduction to Moure's poetry, a section of poetry by others translated by Moure, and an afterword on translation by the poet. An online reader's companion is available at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions.</P><P><B>Hardcover is un-jacketed.</B></P>

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