Böcker av Thylias Moss

From the acclaimed, award-winning poet, this new collection is a gripping search for life and truth.From Thylias Moss, one of America's most innovative poets, comes Tokyo Butter, perhaps her most innovative book to date. Inventing new poetics as she goes, Moss applies her exhilarating capacity for language to a synthesis of the personal, the historical, and the cultural. She searches searches for vestiges of Deirdre, a beloved cousin who has left the living; for hints of Cindy Song, a college student missing since 2001; and for manifestations of her true self in the archaic wings of science.Moss' imagination is, as always, ravenous, interrogativebut in Tokyo Butter there is an urgency amidst the jagged, beautiful verse that has become her trademark.

Named by Black Issues as the best poetry book of 2004, this is the astonishing story of a slave girl in the antebellum South.This critically acclaimed verse-novel follows the unforgettable Varl, a slave on a plantation in Tennessee, on her path to freedom. Wise beyond her years and wildly creative, Varl must choose between the only life she's knownher Mamalee, her friends (especially her beloved Dob), the farmland she's explored since childhoodand her growing need for self-determination. Standing in her path, waiting to quash her spirit, is her master, the cunning Peter Perry, "a collector of rare things" who aims to add Varl herself to his perverse assortment of oddities.With Slave Moth, Thylias Moss shows herself yet again to be "a visionary storyteller" (Charles Simic). Written in gorgeous verse, it is an explosion of life in the face of servitude.

A poet whose innovations have influenced generations of writers, Thylias Moss is a sort of taxonomist-preacher, whose profound meditation on American culture underlies and propels the dazzling lyrical and impassioned passages she writes in outraged response. This new volume gathers together substantial selections from her previous books and follows them with more than fifty pages of daring new work. Whether in early poems or more recent output, Moss make no promises of smooth sailing: even when they begin with beloved cultural icons (Robert Frost, Dr. Who, the Statue of Liberty), her poems spiral outward, insisting on new perspectives, truths, and realities-particularly of African American experience. For more than three decades, Moss has been a fearless re-inventor of poetry's possibilities. Her New & Selected is a momentous publication by "a visionary storyteller, a major figure in contemporary American poetry" (Charles Simic).