The Best American Poetry

Homage to Joe Brainard [by Jacques Bernard]

Nancy Diptych

At the New School's Tishman Auditorium on Tuesday, May 8, writers who knew and loved Joe Brainard (1941-1994) read from the Library of America's new edition of the artist's collected literary works. Joe, a modest man, whose "modesty" (John Ashbery once wrote) "is the modesty of the gods," would have been astonished to find that his poems and prose have been published so handsomely under an imprint so prestigious as that of the Library of America. On hand was Ron Padgett, Brainard's closest friend, who edited The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, Padgett was among those who read their favorite Brainard pieces, as was Paul Auster, who contributed the volume's introduction. Other presenters included Frank Bidart, David Lehman, Edmund White, and Library of America editor-in-chief Geoffrey O'Brien.

A beautiful Brainard anecdote told that evening has Joe on holiday with three friends touring Sicily. Whenever the group reached a new destination, an affectionate postcard from Joe awaited each of them. Edmund White said that on their first date the notoriously shy Brainard brought along a pad so the duo could pass notes back and forth in lieu of talking. 

Portions of I Remember were read aloud as were prose poems, diary entries, aphorisms, sui generis writings, and a play. Some Joe lines: "Writing, for me, is a way of 'talking' the way I wish I could talk." "Actually, I am practical. It's just that, sometimes, being impractical seems practical to me." Or, in a different register, "I remember my parents’ bridge teacher. She was very fat and very butch (cropped hair) and she was a chain smoker. She prided herself on the fact that she didn’t have to carry matches around. She lit each new cigarette from the old one. She lived in a little house behind a restaurant and lived to be very old."

In a letter to Padgett in 1965, Brainard wrote, “I find myself with a certain talent that Frank O’Hara has, and that is to say something quite simple so absolutely that one, without even thinking, assumes you are of course right.” Simplicity and honesty combine in Brainard's "I Remember." The recurrent use of these words at the start of each new entry in a list has become a poetic form and a standard poetry workshop prompt. From an interview with Anne Waldman on the subject of "I Remember": "I feel very much like God writing the bible.  I mean, I feel like I am not really writing it but that it is because of me that it is being written ..."

The Collected Writings does us the service of printing the whole of "I Remember" (including "I Remember More" and "More I Remember More") while simultaneously showing us how rich a trove Brainard left us beyond this signal masterpiece. And all this writing was done in the twenty-year period when Joe, on speed, created his paintings and drawings and collages -- hundreds and hundreds of them until the day he quit taking speed. For the last fourteen years of his life Joe Brainard produced no new work. What did he do? He stayed in his SoHo loft smoking Tareytons and reading great Victorian novels.

Joe was a sweet man. As an assistant professr at Hamilton College I arranged for a retrospective exhibiton of his work to be shown at the Root Art Center in the winter of 1978. The exhibiton coincided with a course I was giving on the New York School. The show featured such collages as "Yellow Madonna," "Butterfly Madonna," "Flower and Butterfly," "Smoke," "Morning Glory," "The End," "Let Me Entertain You," "Shower," and "Eight of Diamonds," as well as a pencil sketch of Jasper Johns," a self-portrait, paper cut-outs, oil-painted canvases, watercolors, gouaches, and numerous mixed media pieces. In all, seventy-eight of Joe's pieces were on display. We invited Joe to spend a January week at the college, during which he gave a reading and a gallery talk. I remember most vividly the afternoon that we had a very large art studio at our disposal and everyone in the class was encouraged to collaborate with a partner on a painting or drawing, a piece of writing, or some admixture of the two. Joe and I filled two dozen pages of a sketch book with our collaborative efforts that afternoon.

If you're wondering, Jacques Bernard is a nonexistent personage. In "I Remember" Joe recalls when he signed his paintings "by Joe." There were also times he thought of adopting a pseudonym -- Bo Jainard or Jacques Bernard. Such an impulse might last a week. But Joe was always Joe in his art, whether painting an Ernie Bushmiller icon (as in the "Nancy Diptych" above) or the whippet on the cover of The Best American Poetry 1998 -- or remembering that, as a boy, when he read "after five days return to" in the upper left corner of an envelope, he thought that after five days the recipient of any letter should return it to its sender.

-- DL

Todd Swift's "Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam" [by DL]

Todd Swift and KIm Lockwood have edited a volume devoted to young British poets -- young defined as born since 1970. The book has just been published and may be ordered on this link. Here is the foreword David Lehman contributed to the book:

Preamble to the New British Poetry

The new British poetry, as represented in this volume, is – to borrow from the poems – “buxom, brazen” (Tiffany Todnut) and “jazzed up” (Simon Turner). It can be “deft and elegant’ (Joanne Limberg), “buttoned-down / in tweed and scarved” on the Mersey (Evan Jones) but is more likely to arrive “unshaven and barefoot, as if on a pilgrimage” (Andre Naffis-Sahley). It spends time “in downtown dives” (Anna Johnson), on “nuclear nights in London” and other cities (Siddharta Bose), “at those dangerous margins / of sleep where anything can be true” (Alexander Freer), raging “against this priggish darkness” (Melanie Challenger).

The poets worry that “we’ll never find a common tongue” (Anne Welsh); they have been “applauded for [their] no-nonsense take on the infantilism of [their] generation” (Luke Kennard); they lust for “the vague, ecstatic kisses / Of a mad mind flushed to profligate invention” (Abigail Parry). The objects of their contemplation include the “odd regatta” of coloured hosiery in the spun cycle (Heather Phillipson), the resemblance between a French kiss and the taking of communion (Loraine Mariner), and the mysterious “third person standing at the foot of the bed, / watching us sleep” and inspiring the poet to undertake a villanelle (Sophie Mackintosh).

Not long ago the line of the English poetic tradition was narrowly defined. You would regularly encounter poems too saturated in their antecedents: poems about the class struggle, bad lovemaking with a carbuncular person, the need to have a piss in the middle of the night, chance meetings on rural roads with decrepit old men who display impressively sturdy minds.

The influences on the new British poets are as varied as globalisation and wide demographics allow. You still get your Eliot and your Marvell. Emily Critchley’s clever take on “To His Coy Mistress” switches gender identities on us: “were I a man, / For whom love studied & love unattained  / Were less vivid, resounded less than the real thing; / I’d sit & think & walk & pass my days / With you in true mutual bliss.” There are further twists: the poet complains that Marvell’s “amorous bird of prey” has turned acquiescent, “the tamed grown tamer,” and so self-pleasure appears to be the speaker’s preferred option.

You get your dose of T. S. Eliot in Caleb Klaices’s “Plastic holy,” which begins with a child’s untutored image of “the Berlin Wall” (“as thick as my house / and hollowed out like a baguette”) and ends with an ironic echo of the “Marie” lines in the first stanza of “The Waste Land.”

But the poets also give you Cavafy, a named influence in two of the poems, and they assimilate Beckett, the art of translation, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, booze, Ecstasy, robotics, the ruins of Coventry, American dreams, British movies of the 1940s. They derive more of their energy from Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five or the bluesy voice of Ray Charles than from Berlioz or Debussy, though the latter float in and are welcome when they do. Rhyme is scarce. The word jazz shows up here and there undefined and stripped of an immediate musical context -- as in John Challis’s “Jazz Maggot” -- as if the term itself constituted a kind of speakeasy code that will admit you to the club.

Simon Turner’s “Brumaggen Jazz” sounds the book’s keynote: “What a feeling, to step out of the musty / twilight bookshop air with a collection / of poetry under your arm & run smack / into a bleach-blonde brassy bellow of a day.” Claire Askew lingers at the bookshop, generating metaphors from the physical objects we are in danger of losing in our electronic age. “I like to bend them to my will -- / turn their spines inverse like gymnasts,” Askew writes in “Books.” The books wait for her “on bookstore shelves, / asleep, stiff as exclamation marks -- / and my fingers itch to break in every one.”

In “Three Strikes,” Caroline Bird beguiles this Yank with her English intonation when she borrows the style of Gertrude Stein and applies it to America’s national pastime:  “I lost one and then I lost the other. / I lost one to keep the other / but the other didn’t want to be kept, / not like that, not as an accidental / second catch of the baseball match / with your palm outstretched to feel for rain.” Though I have followed baseball closely all my life, I do not know what “an accidental / second catch” can possibly mean, but that is not to the detriment of the poem.

The subject of lust – as a deadly sin but an irresistible one -- provokes Tiffany Todnut’s “Way of  Wanton” with its tidy closing rhyme: “I burn / for you, your / deadly wick. / You give me / a fever, a rash / I want to lick.” Of the first lines in the book, the one that seems to be echoing the longest in my brain is Sophie Mayer’s “Today is the day of the smashing of dishes.” But I would close this preamble with my joy in Sophie Hannah’s conjoining of the new and the old in a poem whose end words include “litter,” “Gary Glitter,” “quitter,” and “bitter”: “I am following the Dalai Lama on Twitter / But the Dalai Lama is not following me.”

-- David Lehman (28 September 2011)

The Other Latin@: A Q&A with Blas Falconer [by Emma Trelles]

The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity is an anthology of 20 essays that, according to its co-editor Blas Falconer, aims to counter a narrow perspective of Latino/a writers and honor their diversity. In his own essay, Falconer writes, "When Spanish enters the poem, it is often done because it is part of the memory, not because it is the language of the reader or of the audience."

This idea of how Spanish is mysteriously fused to the neurons of Latino writers resonated with me, and I wanted to hear more from Blas.  He and co-editor Lorraine Lopez will present the book this Thursday, April 26, at noon, as part of the Books and Beyond series at the Library of Congress in partnership with Letras Latinas and the University of Arizona Press. At 6:30 p.m., both Falconer and Lopez will read selections from their own work. For details, visit here.

ET: What was the source of inspiration for this anthology, for the idea that Latino writers are more than a globbed together demographic or a brightly colored (I'm guessing red) wedge in a pie graph?

BF: The book began, in part, as a presentation on an AWP panel I wrote in 2008. The acquisitions editor from University of Arizona Press was in the audience and came up to me afterwards and suggested we do a whole book. I told her I was thinking the exact same thing. We wanted to open it up beyond the Latino identity that's been seen through a small lens.

The book also originated from the fact that I didn't really understand my own relationship to the Latino community or to Puerto Rico. I had traveled there a lot when I was younger, but after my grandmother passed away I stopped going. I also knew that there was this rich Puerto Rican community in New York that I didn't feel quite in sync with because I grew up in Northern Virginia, and there just weren't a lot of Puerto Ricans there. As a writer, I kept asking myself, ‘Am I Latino?’ ‘What does it mean to be Latino?’ I have a white father and a Latina mother, but I have an estranged relationship to Puerto Rico. What does this mean? Then I realized that I saw two of my dearest friends as Latinas - Lisa Chavez, a Chicana from Alaska, and Helena Mesa, who is Cuban and grew up in Pittsburgh - even though they too felt disconnected. I thought, ‘Let's explore this.’ I realized that many writers were challenging the term of Latino in various ways, and I thought reading about their experiences might be interesting.

Another source of inspiration is that sometimes I just don't want to write. I'm on empty. But I'm still fueled by great poetry or writing, so I want to be involved somehow. Editing kind of satisfies that need. Seeing how different people write, how their work or books come together. It's inspiring.            

ET: How did you seek out writers? What was the criteria for submissions?                                                             

BF: The press asked me to widen the scope to include fiction writers, and I asked Lorraine Lopez to be my co-editor. We started thinking about the Latino experience and the Latino identity, and we wanted writers that subverted stereotypical topics -- food, grandmothers, estrangement and exile, urban life. We wanted to push beyond this and see what was next.                 (at right, Blas Falconer)        

ET: What's funny is that all those topics are in the book!

BF: It's totally true. But Lisa Chavez, who's from Alaska, isn't writing about the expected Chicana experience. In his essay, Steven Cordova  basically says, ‘I'm Latino, but I'm HIV positive and gay, and it doesn't mean I'm not Latino or addressing issues of otherness, but I'm doing that through this other aspect of my identity, through this other narrative.' 

In terms of aesthetics, Carmen Gimenez Smith and Gabe Gomez call on Latino poets to explore what might be considered experimental methods of articulating the Latino experience, which often relies heavily on narrative. So those topics are there, but they’re approached in many different ways.

ET: As an editor, do you find it challenging to reject work?

BF: I do. To be honest, we did have to pass on a few essays because there were a couple of times where they were redundant in subject matter. Another one was more for an academic journal in terms of what the press wanted for our imagined reader. No one submitted a bad essay, but some of them just didn't fit. It was hard because we didn't invite anyone to submit that we didn't really admire as writers.

ET: The tone of the essays in this book varies widely: "Latina Enough," by Stephanie Elizondo Griest is witty as well as reflective. In "When We Were Spanish," your co-editor Lorraine Lopez offers a kind of personalized scholarship. Did you both deliberately attempt to include a gamut of styles or did it just turn out that way?

BF: It kind of did just turn out that way. We were interested in not only the ideas in the essays but also in their craft. And we weren't just asking anyone to contribute; we were asking writers. So we encouraged them to write in the manner they felt best addressed their subjects. Gina Franco's essay is much more lyric, for example. It's a stunning essay and very complex in the way she addresses issues of identity.. Some were more academic, such as Peter Ramos’ essay, which had more of a rooting in the American cannon, more of an academic slant. And that was good too.

ET: In "Coyotes," Alex Espinoza writes about speaking at community colleges and remembering how he also sat at a workshop, at University of California, Irvine, and at the same table as Gary Soto and Helena Viramontes. What is the role mentorship plays in understanding identity?

BF: In my own essay, I kind of address this. When I started reading Rane Arroyo and Judith Ortiz Cofer, I thought, ‘Oh these writers are like me in some way.’ But they were able to find their own voices and incorporate their cultural influences. They were doing what I wanted to do, and I saw them as legitimate Latino writers. It was a way in for me. I realized I am also a part of this community. In that sense I saw them as models.

When my first book came out, I felt an incredibly nurturing response from the Latino community that I had never expected. Even today, five years after my first book was published, I still feel welcome and there's no question I'm part of this community. It made me feel as if my own experience was legitimate, and it's resolved this kind of conflict of estrangement I've had. I’m grateful to the Latino community for embracing diversity within itself.

ET: How do you as a Puerto Rican and Latino poet feel or do not feel marginalized?

BF: You know, I don't feel marginalized. I feel like everyone has had that experience of being "the other." I don't care if you're a straight white man; you've felt that sense of otherness. I don't feel any more marginalized than other people do at different times in their lives. I don't think I'm going to be denied a job or not be published or be dismissed because I'm a Latino writer. I don't think I'm going to be ignored. Maybe it's a testament to the strides the Latino writing community has made in publishing. Of course, I've experienced bigotry in my life as a gay man and as a Latino, but I'm not looking over my shoulder or waiting for the next person to shut a door in my face. But other people have had, and still do have, that experience, and I know that it happens.

"Before poems and prayers, there were spells and charms . . ." Poets on the art of basketball [by Catherine Woodard]

“April is the cruellest month,” for a basketball fan. No more college March Madness until next year. Not until May will the NBA playoffs get serious or the WNBA season begin. To continue the quote from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland: “Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain.”

However, if you are a poet and basketball fan, Michigan State University Press has an April antidote: a recently released collection of essays, fast break to line break poets on the art of basketball. The 25 contributors were asked to reflect how the love of basketball influences their poems and their lives as writers. Editor Todd Davis, the author of four books of poems, makes a strong argument that “if baseball is the sport of elegant prose, basketball may be the sport of verse.”

Part of his evidence comes from a poet couple, Margaret Gibson and David McKain, who met at a Yaddo residency. He infected her with his love of basketball. Her subsequent comparison: “Learning the craft in order to be, without self-consciousness, freed into a new rhythm, a heart-leaping, line-breaking fluidity I find only in poetry when I consider language and only in basketball when I consider sport.”

Or Two Things You Need Balls to Do, says Natalie Diaz in her poem in the First Quarter section. (Diaz, a former professional basketball player turned poet, is a recent BAP interview.)

Davis is after “the liminal space where art and body are fused” on the court and on the page.  With a few exceptions most of the essays are new; Basketball and Poetry: The Two Riches by Stephen Dunn is reprinted from one of this books. The topics range from basketball obsessions to serious poetry craft talk. Quincy Troupe, also a former professional player, offers both in a detailed analysis of the multiple drafts required to have the words, images and rhythmic speed of the poem For Magic reflect the improvisational wizardry of one of greatest ever point guards, Magic Johnson.

Of course there is the expected bemoaning of aging body parts by the middle-aged with tacit appreciation that poetry is not hard on the knees. “I have been blessed by elbows,” writes Ross Gay who refers to young hoopsters as kangaroos.  His point, echoed by several other writers, is the thrill of surprise; elbow “as a kind of bold poetic line….Elbow as possibility. Elbow as dream.”

One of my favorites, in a section labeled Halftime, are the observations of Debra Marquart, a former high school cheerleader. She argues a poem or a game of basketball can be defined identically: “a closed and finite experiment designed to test the mettle and training, the natural talents and improvisational skills of its participants.”

From her vantage on the sidelines, she compares the “acoustic landscape of a basketball game” to poetry and pre-poetry: "Before poems and prayers, there were spells and charms – carefully arranged words selected not only for their figurative and literal meanings, but also for their acoustic value, arranged and vocalized in specific, ritualized ways, so that they would travel as acoustic values through the waves of the world and effect change on the material plane.”

Which is why Eliot filled the then-largest collegiate basketball arena in the country on April 30, 1956. His post-season lecture at Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis drew more than 13,000 cheering poetry fans.

Catherine Woodard has played coed, pick-up basketball in New York City for three decades. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, RHINO and other journals.  In 2011, Woodard was the featured poet at UnshodQuills.com, co-published Still Against War/Poems for Marie Ponsot and was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She will be a 2012 fellow at the Hambidge Center in Georgia and is a board member of the Poetry Society of America. Woodard is a former president of Artists Space, one of the nation’s oldest spaces for emerging visual artists. Woodard has a MFA in poetry from the New School University and MS in journalism from Columbia University. 

On Not Knowing with Ron and Sandra (by Jenny Factor)

I know you're probably not local to Los Angeles, but I wish you could come out to hear two of my literary heroes, Sandra M. Gilbert and Ron Carlson read at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena this weekend. 

Founded in 1894, Vroman's is Southern California's oldest and largest independent bookseller (two of Vroman's early employees are restacking books in the photo, above). 

Here are a few words from Ron Carlson on bewilderment and humility and listening in the act of writing:

"Beginning a story without knowing all the terrain is not a comfortable feeling. It is uncomfortable enough in fact to keep most people away from the keyboard...But there are moments in the process of writing a story when you must tolerate that feeling: you stay alert to everthing that is happening and by listening and watching, you find out where you are going by going there. 

"The single largest advantage a veteran writer has over the beginner is this tolerance for not knowing. It's not style, skill, or any other dexterity. An experienced writer has been in those woods before and is willing to be lost; she knows that being lost is necessary for the discoveries to come."

from Ron Carlson Writes a Story (Graywolf Press), page 15

Sandra Gilbert is one of my favorite living writers. She speaks of life as a woman, a daughter, a mother, a thinking person. "You write because you dream a different self into being when you write," Sandra M. Gilbert says in her essay, "Why Do We Write", On Burning Ground: 30 Years of Thinking about Poetry (University of Michigan Press). "You write because you meet a new you in writing, a you you didn't know you had."

Ron Carlson and Sandra Gilbert will be reading at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, California on Sunday, April 15, 4p.m. 

 

God's Optimism in April (by Jenny Factor)

At the AWP conference in Chicago, I attended a panel--the first panel of the first morning--on contemporary Jewish poetry. There was a lot of genius at that table, and an adorable baby in the audience about whom the moderator said, "Don't be angry at that baby. We like that baby." A very happy little panel. Of all the things in that room I found to like, I left there utterly taken with the work of young Hasidic poet, Yehoshua November. 

Here is the poem he read that morning, from his first book, God's Optimism (Main Street Rag, 2010). 

Baal Teshuvas at the Mikvah

Sometimes you see them

in the dressing area

of the ritual bath,

young bearded men unbuttoning

their white shirts,

slipping out of their black trousers,

until, standing entirely naked,

they are betrayed by the tattoos

of their past life:

a ring of fire climbing up a leg,

an eagle whose feathery wing span

spreads the width of the chest,

or worse, the scripted name of a woman

other than one's wife.

 

Over and Under by John Brehm

So sexy to slide under-

neath a river,  

to sit inside this

snakelike sub-

marine-like 

subway car and

freely imagine

the world above—

the Brooklyn

Bridge invisibly

trembling with the

weight of its 

own beauty, 

the East River

still guided by

the grooves

Walt Whitman’s 

eyes wore in it,

the bulldog tug-

boats pushing the

passively impressive

broad-bottomed 

barges around, 

and the double-

decker orange

and black Staten

Island Ferries,

with their aura

of overworked

pack-mule

mournfulness,

and beyond them

the Atlantic Ocean

which I lately learned

was brought here

by ice-comets three

billion years ago, 

which explains 

a few things, like

why everybody  

feels so alienated,

and of course

the thoughts being

thought by every

person in New

York City at

this moment—

vast schools of

undulating fish

curving and rising 

in the cloud-swirling 

wind-waved sky,

surrounded by

the vaster emptiness

of non-thought 

which holds them

and which they try

not to think 

about and you 

lying in bed in 

your sixth-floor 

walk-up sublet 

on St. Mark’s Place—

such a breath-

taking ascension!

imagining me

rising now to meet you.

from Help is on the Way by John Brehm (U of Wisc, 2012)
originally published in Poetry

 

Speaking of Funny Women: Time to Buy Nin Andrews' "The Secret Life Of Mannequins" from Kattywompus Press

If you've been following this blog, you've read Nin Andrews' Meet the Press feature for which she interviews the unsung editors of small pressses.  But if that's all you know of Nin, you are in for a major treat: she's one of the funniest, most original poets around and she is also attracting a large following for her hilarious parodies and cartoons, many of which can be found on her blog here.  Click on the cover image above or here to buy her book.

On Saturday, April 28th at 7 PM, join Nin Andrews, Robert Miltner, Karen Schubert, and Eric Anderson  from Kattywompus Press for an evening of poetry, books, and footsteps overhead at Mac’s Backs, 1820 Coventry Road, Cleveland, OH 44106.  More information here.

-- sdh

POMPEII by John Brehm

Standing on the subway, exhausted, dispirited, 

glancing over the exhausted, dispirited faces

of my fellow passengers, I read posters

for a new movie about Pompeii. 

“How can you breathe when the air is on fire?”  

“How can you escape a boiling mudslide?”

“How can you outrun an eruption 

faster than this train?” they ask. 

Obviously the ad writer has never been 

on this train, because this is a Q train,

and anybody who can’t outrun a Q train 

must be on death’s doorstep anyway 

and will soon be overtaken by time itself, 

if not a boiling mudslide, though sometimes 

that’s what time feels like, thick 

and burning, pushing you on and pulling

you back. And now we rise creaking 

over the Manhattan Bridge, where

one can see through scratchy windows 

the city skyline and the buildings that are 

not there, where thousands tried 

to breathe air on fire and failed, 

tried to flee an avalanche of concrete

and falling bodies and failed. 

If only they’d been asked to outrun something 

as slow as this slow train that takes us home—

how easily they might have done it.

But that is not what they were asked to do.

from Help is on the Way by John Brehm (U of Wisc, 2012)

originally published in Poetry

Kevin Young's "Grey Album": Where Riff Meets Mashup

<<<
The place everything has come to is where a new book of essays by the poet and professor Kevin Young lives: in some great, grey area. The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness roughly spans the history of black American art and tries, among other things, to get at what it is, essentially, to be black.

Young selectively unpacks the enormous suitcase of black culture and, too infrequently, asserts himself into the sorting. He remembers, revisits, and revises. The task he's set before himself is both unenviable (that's one big-ass suitcase) and exciting (what if he actually pulls this off?). The book argues and sifts its way from slave narratives to jazz to funk and rock and hip-hop with stops along the way for close reconsiderations of poets like Langston Hughes and Bob Kaufman.

It's full of allusions and ideas, half-ideas, dropped names, dropped ideas. You always feel that Young is severely under the influences of everything and everyone he's writing about. These are essays, treatises, and term papers—written with a contact high. In five pages, he might mention The Tempest, the Titanic, W.H. Auden, the Middle Passage, the boxer Jack Johnson, Peer Gynt, Muhammad Ali, Seamus Heaney, Bo Diddley, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Johnson, Black Like Me, and Tiger Woods. He is riffing, freestyling, and action-painting, yes. But he’s also driving so fast that there's rarely time to stop and look out the windows.
--  Wesley Morris, Slate
>>>
For the rest of Wesley Morris's Slate review, click here. You may order the book here.