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Bluest nude : poems / Ama Codjoe.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Minneapolis, Minnesota : Milkweed Editions, 2022Copyright date: ©2022Edition: First editionDescription: 91 pages ; 22 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9781571315427
  • 157131542X
Subject(s): Genre/Form:
Contents:
I. Blueprint ; On seeing and being seen ; Two girls bathing ; Marigolds of fire ; Labor ; Poem after Betye Saar's The Liberation of Aunt Jemima ; Diamondback ; "After the ..., I yearned to be reckless. To smash" ; Detail from "Poem after Betye Saar's The Liberation of Aunt Jemima" ; Primordial mirror ; Le Sacre du printemps ; "After the ..., I had the urge to dance" -- II. She said -- III. Posing nude ; Burying seeds ; At the fish house ; Why I left the garden ; "After the ..., I mothered my mother" ; Facing off ; After the ..., time turned like a mood ring" ; Resembling flowers resembling weeds ; Of being in motion ; "After the laughter subsided the crying kept after we held hands" ; Heaven as Olympic spa -- IV. Bluest nude ; Bathers with a turtle ; Slow drag with branches of pine ; Lotioning my mother's back ; Aubade ; A family woven like night through trees ; Etymology of a mood ; Poem after an iteration of a painting by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, destroyed by the artist herself ; Head on ice #5 ; After a year of forgetting ; "There is a scar near my right eye no lover ever noticed."
Summary: "Ama Codjoe's highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life"-- Provided by publisher.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 811.6 C669 Available 33111011182207
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work

Ama Codjoe's highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life .

Codjoe's poems explore how the archetype of the artist complicates the typical expectations of women: be gazed upon , be silent , be selfless , reproduce . Dialoguing with and through art, Bluest Nude considers alternative ways of holding and constructing the self. From Lorna Simpson to Gwendolyn Brooks to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, contemporary and ancestral artists populate Bluest Nude in a choreography of Codjoe's making. Precise and halting, this finely wrought, riveting collection is marked by an acute rendering of highly charged emotional spaces.

Purposefully shifting between the role of artist and subject, seer and seen, Codjoe's poems ask what the act of looking does to a person--public looking, private looking, and that most intimate, singular spectacle of looking at one's self. What does it mean to see while being seen? In poems that illuminate the tension between the possibilities of openness and and its impediments, Bluest Nude offers vulnerability as a medium to be immersed in and, ultimately, shared as a kind of power: "There are as many walls inside me / as there are bones at the bottom of the sea," Codjoe writes in the masterful titular poem. "I want to be seen clearly or not at all."

"The end of the world has ended," Codjoe's speaker announces, "and desire is still / all I crave."

Startling and seductive in equal measure, this formally ambitious collection represents a powerful, luminous beginning.

Includes bibliographical references.

I. Blueprint ; On seeing and being seen ; Two girls bathing ; Marigolds of fire ; Labor ; Poem after Betye Saar's The Liberation of Aunt Jemima ; Diamondback ; "After the ..., I yearned to be reckless. To smash" ; Detail from "Poem after Betye Saar's The Liberation of Aunt Jemima" ; Primordial mirror ; Le Sacre du printemps ; "After the ..., I had the urge to dance" -- II. She said -- III. Posing nude ; Burying seeds ; At the fish house ; Why I left the garden ; "After the ..., I mothered my mother" ; Facing off ; After the ..., time turned like a mood ring" ; Resembling flowers resembling weeds ; Of being in motion ; "After the laughter subsided the crying kept after we held hands" ; Heaven as Olympic spa -- IV. Bluest nude ; Bathers with a turtle ; Slow drag with branches of pine ; Lotioning my mother's back ; Aubade ; A family woven like night through trees ; Etymology of a mood ; Poem after an iteration of a painting by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, destroyed by the artist herself ; Head on ice #5 ; After a year of forgetting ; "There is a scar near my right eye no lover ever noticed."

"Ama Codjoe's highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life"-- Provided by publisher.

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