American Sublime: Poems

A brilliant new collection by Elizabeth Alexander, whose poems bristle with the irresistible quality of a world seen fresh (Rita Dove, The Washington Post)

Too many people have seen too much
and lived to tell, or not tell, or tell
with their silent, patterned bodies,
their glass eyes, gone legs, flower-printed flesh . . .
-from Notes From

In her fourth remarkable collection, Elizabeth Alexander voices the outcries, dreams, and histories of an African American tradition that goes back to the slave rebellion on the Amistad and to the artists' canvases of nineteenth-century America. In persona poems, historical narratives, jazz riffs, sonnets, elegies, and a sequence of ars poetica, American Sublime is Alexander's most vivid and varied collection and affirms her place as one of America's most lively and gifted writers.

Alexander is an unusual thing, a sensualist of history, a romanticist of race. She weaves biography, history, experience, pop culture and dream. Her poems make the public and private dance together. --Chicago Tribune

Author: Elizabeth Alexander
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 10/01/2005
Pages: 96
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 8.92h x 6.12w x 0.30d
ISBN13: 9781555974329
ISBN10: 1555974325
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American | African American & Black

About the Author

Elizabeth Alexander is the author of three other poetry collections, most recently Antebellum Dream Book, as well as a collection of essays, The Black Interior.