Testify
5/5
()
About this ebook
This award-winning debut book of poetry examines race, masculinity, religion, class, and the African American experience in the American Midwest.
A book of elegiac ambivalence, Testify’s speaker often finds himself trapped between received binaries: black and white, ghetto and suburban, atheism and Catholicism. In many ways, this work is a Bildungsroman detailing the maturation of a black man raised in the crack-laden 1980s, with hip-hop, jazz, and blues as its soundtrack. Rendered with keen attention to the economic decline of the Midwest due to the departure of the automotive industry, this book portrays the speaker wrestling with his city’s demise, family relationships, interracial love, and notions of black masculinity. Never letting anyone, including the speaker, off the hook, Testify refuses sentimentality and didacticism and dwells in a space of uncertainty, where meaning and identity are messy, complicated, and multivalent.
“Manuel charts the raw emotional complexities and the impossible daily reckonings that confront a young black man coming of age today in America. . . . Each powerful testimony in this collection stands as evidence of an eloquent and dramatic new voice in American poetry.” ―David St. John, author of The Auroras and Study for the World’s Body
“These potent poems testify to those ambivalent moments that might rend or right us, as when an interracial couple drive past a truck with a Confederate flag painted on its back windshield and from which a little boy turns to smile and wave: his ‘blond hair // split down the middle like a Bible / left open to the Book of Psalms.’” ―Anna Journey, author of The Atheist Wore Goat Silk
Douglas Manuel
Douglas Manuel was born in Anderson, Indiana and now resides in Long Beach, California. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University, an MFA in poetry from Butler University, and a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. His first collection of poems, Testify, won an IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award for poetry, and his poems and essays can be found in numerous literary journals, magazines, and websites, most recently Zyzzyva, Pleiades, and the New Orleans Review. He has traveled to Egypt and Eritrea with The University of Iowa's International Writing Program to teach poetry. A recipient of the Dana Gioia Poetry Award and a fellowship from the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts, he is a Bayard Rustin Fellow at Whittier College and teaches at Spalding University’s low-res MFA program. He resides in Whittier, CA.
Related to Testify
Related ebooks
City of Insomnia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBruises, Birthmarks & Other Calamities Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGeography of the Forehead Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings[explicit lyrics]: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Days You Bring Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSmells Like Teen Angst Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSally's Hair: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flyover Country: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMy Nature Is Hunger: New and Selected Poems: 1989–2004 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Chick Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5THOU Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for Charles Wright's "Black Zodiac" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCollected Poems: Volume One Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHooked Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poetry of Lockdown 2020 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsO Paradise: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Order in Which We Do Things: The Poetry of Tom Wayman Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFrom Scarsdale: A Childhood Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEscape Path Lighting Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMaking Love to Roget's Wife: Poems New and Selected Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Horrible Dance Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMarginalised Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSixfold Poetry Winter 2021 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAbstract Concrete Poetry Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUseful Junk Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAnyone Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This Is Still Life: Poems: The Mineral Point Poetry Series, #8 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Dark Pond Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Golden Hour Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Leaves of Grass Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Poetry For You
Heart Talk: Poetic Wisdom for a Better Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beyond Thoughts: An Exploration Of Who We Are Beyond Our Minds Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Way Forward Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pillow Thoughts II: Healing the Heart Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You Better Be Lightning Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Works Of Oscar Wilde Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dream Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Enough Rope: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Gilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf: A New Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems of John Keats (with an Introduction by Robert Bridges) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Weary Blues Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Testify
1 rating0 reviews