Böcker av Frank X Walker

For decades, Frank X Walker has reclaimed essential American lives through his path-breaking historical poetry: from Medgar Evers in Turn Me Loose, winner of the NAACP Award; to York, the enslaved explorer who joined the Lewis and Clark expedition, in Buffalo Dance, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award. In this stirring new collection, he reimagines the experiences of Black Civil War soldiers-including his own ancestors-who enlisted in the Union Army in exchange for emancipation. Moving chronologically from antebellum Kentucky through Reconstruction, Walker braids the voices of the United States Coloured Troops with their family members, as well as slave-owners and prominent historical figures-including Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln and Magaret Garner-into a wide-ranging series of "persona poems" imbued with atmospheric imagery and brimming with indomitable spirit. Evoking the pride and perseverance of formerly enslaved General Charles Young, Walker hums: "I, am America's promise, my mother's song, / and the reason my father had every right to dream."

"In his new book of poems, Love House, Frank X Walker invites his readers in and speaks to them with consummate grace and intimacy about the things that matter most: loving, parenting, aging, living, dying, as well as basketball, birds, gardens, and golf. Walker, who is well known for giving voice to historical characters and bringing their stories to life, uses his insight, imagination, and hard-earned wisdom to write about himself and his family, including secrets, fears, and the unsolved mysteries that underlie daily living. Love House is "made of air, poems, books, and art" and real loving people brought to the page by one of today's finest and most prolific poets." - Greg Pape, author of A Field of First Things

"We all wear masks. There are people with whom we can take our masks off and speak from the heart. Professor Walker is an expert in masks, or personas. And he well knows that sometimes masks let us speak deep truths about the world. He also knows masks sometimes protect us, sometimes keep us from ourselves, and sometimes cause us pain. Paul Dunbar, in "We Wear the Mask," asks of the world and of poetry, "Why should the world be over-wise, / In counting all our tears and sighs?" Yet, it seems that now, as then, the world pays too little attention to the tears and sighs about which Dunbar sings. We are so grateful that Walker has taken the time to sit with death and pain and heartbreak, to sit and tune his voice to sing these elegies, so that we can gather around him to sing through our tears with head held high. " -Jeremy Paden

This groundbreaking work of Black Appalachian poetry portrays award-winning poet Frank X Walker¿s journey growing up ¿Affrilachian¿ in rural Kentucky.

A powerful collection from Frank X Walker, winner of the 2005 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry.In 68 poems, Kentucky writer Frank X Walker expertly melds autobiography, political commentary, and literary allusions into a devastatingly beautiful journey through the real "e;Affrilachia"e;- a word Walker created to render visible the lives of the African-Americans who call the rural and Appalachian South home. Written with passion, clarity, and emotional honesty, the poems in Black Box illuminate profound experiences at the intersection of race, love, social justice, family, identity and place.Published in 2005 by Old Cove Press

Around the void left by the murder of Medgar Evers in 1963, the poems in this collection speak, unleashing the strong emotions both before and after the moment of assassination. Poems take on the voices of Evers's widow, Myrlie; his brother, Charles; his assassin, Byron De La Beckwith; and each of De La Beckwith's two wives.