Splay Anthem

Splay Anthem

• Used Book in Good Condition

<p><strong>In a stunning new collection of poems of transport and transcendence, African-American poet Nathaniel Mackey's "asthmatic song of aspiration" scuttles across cultures and histories―from America to Andalucía, from Ethiopia to Vienna―in a sexy, beautiful adaptive dance.</strong></p> Part antiphonal rant, part rhythmic whisper, Nathaniel Mackey's new collection of poems, <em>Splay Anthem</em>, takes the reader to uncharted poetic spaces. Divided into three sections―"Braid," "Fray," and "Nub" (one referent Mackey notes in his stellar Introduction: "the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become, the shrunken place the earth has become, planet Nub")―<em>Splay Anthem</em> weaves together two ongoing serial poems Mackey has been writing for over twenty years, "Song of the Andoumboulou" and "Mu" (though "Mu no more itself / than Andoumboulou").<br /><br /> In the cosmology of the Dogon of West Africa, the Andoumboulou are progenitor spirits, and the song of the Andoumboulou is a song addressed to the spirits, a funeral song, a song of rebirth. <em>"</em>Mu<em>,"</em> too, splays with meaning: <em>muni</em> bird, Greek <em>muthos</em>, a Sun Ra tune, a continent once thought to have existed in the Pacific. With the vibrancy of a Mira painting, Mackey's poems trace the lost tribe of "we" through waking and dreamtime, through a multitude of geographies, cultures, histories, and musical traditions, as poetry here serves as the intersection of everything, myth's music, spirit lift.