Talking Dirty to the Gods: Poems - Softcover

Komunyakaa, Yusef

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374527938 ISBN 13: 9780374527938

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001

Synopsis

A daredevil poetic achievement nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award

. . . A god isn't worth
A drop of water in the hell of his good

Imagination, if we can't curse
Sunsets & threaten to forsake him
In his storehouse of belladonna,
Tiger hornets, & snakebites.
--from "Meditations in a Swine Yard"

No turn in any life cycle is taboo as Yusef Komunyakaa examines the primal rituals shared by insects, animals, human beings, and deities in Talking Dirty to the Gods. From "Hearsay" to "Heresy," these 132 poems, each consisting of four quatrains, are framed by innuendo and lively satire. Komunyakaa looks to nature and configures his own paradigm, in which an event as commonplace as the jewel wasp laying an egg in a cockroach becomes every bit as grand as Zeus's infidelity. The formally rigorous collection is itself a design for a systematic cosmos, a world compressed but abundant in surprise and delight.

About this title

About the Author:

Yusef Komunyakaa was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1947. His eleven books of poems include Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. He is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

No decree or creed can outlaw you

As you take every living thing apart. Little

Master of earth, no one gets to heaven

Without going through you first.

-from "Ode to the Maggot"

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0374527938
• ISBN 13: 9780374527938
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 134