Congotronic
About This Book
At once original, strange, funny, and unnerving, Shane Book's Congotronic takes the reader into unstable territory, where multiple layers of voice, diction, and music collide. Some of these poems have the sparse directness of a kind of bleak prayer; others mingle the earthbound rhythms of hip-hop with the will-to-transcendence of high Romanticism.Harnessing techniques of the cinematic and audio arts, Book's poems splice, sample, collage, and jump-cut language from an array of sources, including slave narratives, Western philosophy, hip hop lyrics, and the diaries of plantation owners. In fusing disparate texts, each poem in this collection attempts to create a community in language. Thus, at its core, the project is utopicāor more precisely, to borrow from Duke Ellingtonāthe project is "blutopic."The book's anchoring series contains an apocryphal narrative grounded in the journey of the Middle Passage and an older mythic history from the West African epic of Sundiata. Here elements of Afrofuturism coagulate with an R&B grin as social forces challenge a sense of personhood, prompting free-jazz inflected conversations between the pieces of a shattered, polyvocal self.Here is a world poet of the Sonic Global South sheathed in a Northern Hemispheric glow suit, high "on Coltrane, on Zeus" but also on the old and new schools of Descartes, M.I.A., Cecil Taylor, Gilbert Ryle, Freud, and Jay Z, among othersāor as one poem puts it, the "aural truths."
Frequently asked questions
Information
Table of contents
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- African Evening
- World Town
- Security of the First World
- Last
- Pore Tune
- Janelas
- Mack Daddy Manifesto
- The Collected Novellas of Gilbert Ryle
- The Ivorian ābecause because"
- A Laborious Wakefulness or Was It a Most Unapologetic Whistling in the Ear
- The Colony Mating Song
- Bronze Age
- Chinese Blow Up Doll
- Freetown
- Everywhere
- H.N.I.C.
- Flagelliforms
- Notes