Electronic book text | |
October 3, 2017 | |
9780819577450 | |
English | |
104 | |
9.50 Inches (US) | |
7.00 Inches (US) | |
$11.99 USD, £8.95 GBP | |
v2.1 Reference | |
Paperback / softback | |
June 5, 2018 | |
9780819577443 | |
English | |
104 | |
9.50 Inches (US) | |
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.6 Pounds (US) | |
$15.95 USD, £11.95 GBP | |
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semiautomatic
Poetry that acts as a fierce and loving resistance to violence
Art can't shield our bodies or stabilize the earth's climate, but Evie Shockley's semiautomatic insists that it can feed the spirit and reawaken the imagination. The volume responds primarily to the twenty-first century's inescapable evidence of the terms of black life—not so much new as newly visible. The poems trace a whole web of connections between the kinds of violence that affect people across the racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, national, and linguistic boundaries that do and do not divide us. How do we protect our humanity, our ability to feel deeply and think freely, in the face of a seemingly endless onslaught of physical, social, and environmental abuses? Where do we find language to describe, process, and check the attacks and injuries we see and suffer? What actions can break us out of the soul-numbing cycle of emotions, moving through outrage, mourning, and despair, again and again? In poems that span fragment to narrative and quiz to constraint, from procedure to prose and sequence to song, semiautomatic culls past and present for guides to a hoped-for future.
Art can't shield our bodies or stabilize the earth's climate, but Evie Shockley's semiautomatic insists that it can feed the spirit and reawaken the imagination. The volume responds primarily to the twenty-first century's inescapable evidence of the terms of black life—not so much new as newly visible. The poems trace a whole web of connections between the kinds of violence that affect people across the racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, national, and linguistic boundaries that do and do not divide us. How do we protect our humanity, our ability to feel deeply and think freely, in the face of a seemingly endless onslaught of physical, social, and environmental abuses? Where do we find language to describe, process, and check the attacks and injuries we see and suffer? What actions can break us out of the soul-numbing cycle of emotions, moving through outrage, mourning, and despair, again and again? In poems that span fragment to narrative and quiz to constraint, from procedure to prose and sequence to song, semiautomatic culls past and present for guides to a hoped-for future.
About the Author
EVIE SHOCKLEY is the author of several collections of poetry, including a half-red sea and the new black. She has won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and fellowships from Cave Canem, MacDowell, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. She currently is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University New Brunswick.
Reviews
"Evie Shockley burns up the page with her new collection.... semiautomatic is a 21st century survival guide, fierce and full of compassion."—Diana Whitney, San Francisco Chronicle
"[N]otable not only for the way it navigates questions of identity & politics, but for the variety & virtuosity of its use of form."—Robert Archambeau, The Hudson Review
"In semiautomatic, a 2018 Pulitzer finalist and the recent winner of the Hurston/Wright Award for Poetry, Evie Shockley repurposes literary and musical modes from across centuries of African-American and diasporic traditions. Given the choice between formal flawlessness and page-spanning sprawls, between autobiographical revelation and collective outcry, she welcomes the self-contradictions of being all the above."—Christopher Spaide, LA Review of Books
"[N]otable not only for the way it navigates questions of identity & politics, but for the variety & virtuosity of its use of form."—Robert Archambeau, The Hudson Review
"In semiautomatic, a 2018 Pulitzer finalist and the recent winner of the Hurston/Wright Award for Poetry, Evie Shockley repurposes literary and musical modes from across centuries of African-American and diasporic traditions. Given the choice between formal flawlessness and page-spanning sprawls, between autobiographical revelation and collective outcry, she welcomes the self-contradictions of being all the above."—Christopher Spaide, LA Review of Books
Endorsements
"Evie Shockley suggests that poetry is necessary to seeing, surviving with equilibrium and wholeness in this period's vital and precarious junctures. The poems in semiautomatic are on fire. This will make an excellent source book of poetic form and historically grounded black aesthetics for the classroom."—Erica Hunt, Long Island University
"Evie Shockley's semiautomatic goes beyond mere weaponry. This book is revelatory. A tool in the chest of cultural workers, a vocabulary that resists decoration; this is self-portraiture and truth-telling at its best. From her epic 'the topsy suite' to her one-acts (a new form), through her fearless lens and appropriation of authorities, there's no level of denial or proof-vest that will protect you from Shockley's poetry. You can run, Reader, but you will not be able to look the other way."—Willie Perdomo, author of The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon
"This is an extraordinary, wonderful book. Evie Shockley is a great black poet. I know she might not put it that way, and sees all of what's problematic in my putting it that way. Her greatness is in that, too. She makes revolution irresistible just like she heard we should."—Fred Moten, author of The Little Edges
"There is no keener mind in American poetry than Shockley's, with her quick turns and inflections, slipping between subjectivity and documentary, between verse and refrain. Her poems engage—politically, formally, historically, profoundly—with the redistribution of power through language. Read this book and get shook."—D. A. Powell
"Evie Shockley suggests that poetry is necessary to seeing, surviving with equilibrium and wholeness in this period's vital and precarious junctures. The poems in semiautomatic are on fire. This will make an excellent source book of poetic form and historically grounded black aesthetics for the classroom."—Erica Hunt, Long Island University
"Evie Shockley's semiautomatic goes beyond mere weaponry. This book is revelatory. A tool in the chest of cultural workers, a vocabulary that resists decoration; this is self-portraiture and truth-telling at its best. From her epic 'the topsy suite' to her one-acts (a new form), through her fearless lens and appropriation of authorities, there's no level of denial or proof-vest that will protect you from Shockley's poetry. You can run, Reader, but you will not be able to look the other way."—Willie Perdomo, author of The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon
"This is an extraordinary, wonderful book. Evie Shockley is a great black poet. I know she might not put it that way, and sees all of what's problematic in my putting it that way. Her greatness is in that, too. She makes revolution irresistible just like she heard we should."—Fred Moten, author of The Little Edges
"There is no keener mind in American poetry than Shockley's, with her quick turns and inflections, slipping between subjectivity and documentary, between verse and refrain. Her poems engage—politically, formally, historically, profoundly—with the redistribution of power through language. Read this book and get shook."—D. A. Powell
"Evie Shockley suggests that poetry is necessary to seeing, surviving with equilibrium and wholeness in this period's vital and precarious junctures. The poems in semiautomatic are on fire. This will make an excellent source book of poetic form and historically grounded black aesthetics for the classroom."—Erica Hunt, Long Island University
Wesleyan University Press | |
Wesleyan Poetry Series | |
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Electronic book text | |
October 3, 2017 | |
9780819577450 | |
English | |
104 | |
9.50 Inches (US) | |
7.00 Inches (US) | |
$11.99 USD, £8.95 GBP | |
v2.1 Reference | |
Paperback / softback | |
June 5, 2018 | |
9780819577443 | |
English | |
104 | |
9.50 Inches (US) | |
7.00 Inches (US) | |
.6 Pounds (US) | |
$15.95 USD, £11.95 GBP | |
v2.1 Reference | |
Other Titles by Evie Shockley
suddenly we
Evie Shockley
Mar 2023
- Wesleyan University Press
$26.00 USD
- Hardback
$15.95 USD
- Paperback / softback
$25.00 USD
- Downloadable audio file
She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks
M. NourbeSe Philip
Oct 2015
- Wesleyan University Press
$15.95 USD
- Paperback / softback
$12.99 USD
- Electronic book text
the new black
Evie Shockley
Mar 2012
- Wesleyan University Press
$24.95 USD
- Hardback
$15.95 USD
- Paperback / softback
$12.99 USD
- Electronic book text
Other Titles from Wesleyan Poetry Series
Icelight
Ranjit Hoskote
Mar 2023
- Wesleyan University Press
$26.00 USD
- Hardback
$15.95 USD
- Paperback / softback
In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful
Abigail Chabitnoy
Nov 2022
- Wesleyan University Press
$25.00 USD
- Hardback
$15.95 USD
- Paperback / softback
Other Titles in POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Death, Grief, Loss
Separation Anxiety
Gavin Bradley
May 2022
- University of Alberta Press
$19.99 USD
- Paperback / softback
The Country Where Everyone's Name Is Fear
Boris Khersonsky, Luidmila Khersonsky, edited by Katie Farris, Ilya Kaminsky
Apr 2022
- Lost Horse Press
$20.00 USD
- Paperback / softback
Other Titles in Poetry
Winter Fruit
Dale B.J. Randall
Dec 2025
- University Press of Kentucky
$40.00 USD
- Hardback
$12.95 USD
- Electronic book text
What Things Cost
edited by Rebecca Gayle Howell, Ashley M. Jones, Emily J. Jalloul
Mar 2023
- University Press of Kentucky
$27.95 USD
- Hardback
$27.95 USD
- Electronic book text
$27.95 USD
- Electronic book text
A Century of Modern Chinese Poetry
edited by Michelle Yeh, Zhangbin Li, Frank Stewart
Dec 2022
- University of Washington Press
$99.00 USD
- Hardback
$30.00 USD
- Paperback / softback