How to celebrate a revolution -- Hex -- asterisk -- Tamir Rice case -- Airsoft -- Fragments of Tamir's body -- Bored, Tamir chooses to dream -- A tempest -- A window into Caliban -- Vestiges -- How far away is Caliban's light? -- A window into Sycorax -- "Mother to son" -- A window into Prospero -- A tempest in a teacup -- Sycorax blues -- suspect -- Such sweet thunder -- A midsummer night on the town in Bamako -- juvenile -- Rokia discusses her photo as Girl in Skirt -- Rokia's parents -- Day at the beach -- Beach day -- Shango prepares for the dance -- The tailor -- Woman ascending a staircase -- "Masked Man" visits the tailor -- "Masked Man" in the mirror before the dance -- The dance -- Snapshots -- The photographer's first view of the dance at Dossalo's, 1967 -- Two women side-by-side, in short dresses -- Man in stingy-brim hat, suit jacket, and briefcase -- Man in vest with open arms -- Woman in sunglasses and newsboy cap -- Couple, back-to-back -- Rokia and Shango dance -- The next day -- adult -- When I waked -- "When I waked, I cried to dream again" -- Ira Aldridge was here -- fair -- Such sweet thunder -- Othello the Moor -- Aaron the Moor -- grandfather -- How to celebrate a revolution -- Art credits. Acknowledgements -- Art credits.
Summary:
A dynamic, moving hybrid work that celebrates Black youth, often too fleeting, and examines Black lives lost to police violence. "In this astonishing volume of poems and lyric prose, Whiting Award-winner A. Van Jordan draws comparisons to Black characters in Shakespearean plays--Caliban and Sycorax from The Tempest, Aaron the Moor from Titus Andronicus, and the eponymous antihero of Othello--to mourn the deaths of Black people, particularly Black children, at the hands of police officers. What do these characters, and the ways they are defined by the white figures who surround them, have in common with Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and other Black people killed in the twenty-first century? Balancing anger and grief with celebration, Jordan employs an elastic variety of poetic forms, including ekphrastic sestinas inspired by the photography of Malick Sidibé, fictional dialogues, and his signature definition poems that break down the insidious power of words like "fair," "suspect," and "juvenile." He invents a new form of window poems, based on a characterization exercise, to see Shakespeare's Black characters in three dimensions, and finds contemporary parallels in the way these characters are othered, rendered at once undesirable and hypersexualized, a threat and a joke. At once a stunning inquiry into the roots of racist violence and a moving recognition of the joy of Black youth before the world takes hold, When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again expresses the preciousness and precarity of life." -- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.