Transcircularities: New & Selected Poems - Softcover

Troupe, Quincy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566891353 ISBN 13: 9781566891356

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 2002

Synopsis

Much like the vibrant, riveting reading performances for which he is so well-known, Quincy Troupe’s award-winning poetry is pure rhythm and deep bass beats that barely stay on the page. This magnificent new volume captures Troupe’s voice stronger than ever as he issues celebratory and pointed statements on jazz, sports, love, art, literature, American life, and the sublimity of it all.

Winner of a Peabody and two American Book Awards, Quincy Troupe has published several books of poetry and two bestselling books about Miles Davis. He is a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California, San Diego.

About this title

About the Author

Featured on two PBS poetry series, Troupe is the author of seven volumes of poetry including Transcircularities, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and Minnesotabased Talking Volumes bookclub selection. In addition to children's books on Magic Johnson and Stevie Wonder, Troupe chronicled his friendship with Miles Davis in Miles and Me, soon to be a feature film.

From Publishers Weekly

A multi-award-winning veteran of performance poetry and of the printed page, California's first official poet laureate demonstrates his ebullient and undimmed powers in this capacious selection from his eight previous books of verse. Troupe (Weather Reports, etc.) got his start in the late-'60s heyday of the Black Arts movement, and that era's focus on speech rhythms and syncopations bore fruit in Troupe's striking early poems: "the kids of chicago have eyes that are older/ than the deepest pain in the world." Throughout his career Troupe has paid close attention to jazz, eventually penning two books of prose about Miles Davis; his verse returns continually to swing, bebop and free-jazz giants, imitating, commemorating or praising Coltrane, Duke, Bud Powell and others in a series of musicianly poems culminating in the recent "Back to the Dream Time: Miles Speaks from the Dead." Troupe's forms, driven by performability, range from ecstatic odes to overtly political expostulations. Recurrent topics include the poet's extended family; the nature of poetry as performance and praise; and the poet's sense of particular U.S. locales, from the Manhattan of early work to the California coast that provides the occasion for his most joyful new poems. Other new work continues Troupe's success in familiar modes of praise and prophecy. A memorial to an admired painter praises his "new kind of visual, tribal language,/ archaic & new, aural"; quips and rants describe "the way some crazed white people have attacked/ the entire world," while the extended meditation "9/11 Emergency Calls Coming into Manhattan" shows "what terror really is, really feels like, is the dread you are thinking of now."
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1566891353
• ISBN 13: 9781566891356
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 350