Magic City (Wesleyan Poetry Series) [Hardcover]

Yusef Komunyakaa (Author)

Book Description

Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series | Publication Date: October 9, 1992

Komunyakaa vividly evokes his childhood in Bogalusa, Louisiana, once a center of Klan activity, and later a focus of Civil Rights efforts. He portrays a child's dawning awareness of the natural and social order around him, rhythms of life in the community, the constant struggle for survival in the face of poverty and racism, the adolescent's awakening sexuality, the beginnings of the poet's awareness of his life and community as it exists in the context of history, and his emerging understanding of his own identity.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"His finest book to date--the most ambitious, the richest in writing and psychological drama, the most emotionally and intellectually demanding. It feels as though he has raised this book out of the darkest regions of his art and life" (Sherod Santos ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From the Publisher

5 1/2 x 8 1/2 trim. LC 92-53863 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 68 pages
• Publisher: Wesleyan (October 9, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0819522058
• ISBN-13: 978-0819522054
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,177,245 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unblinking portrait of a childhood in the Jim Crow South, February 26, 2000

By 

R. H. White (mn usa) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Magic City (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Komunyakaa, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his Neon Vernacular, here writes about his childhood in a Louisiana town. The poems are poignant but unsentimental: the child's world has a certain kind of innocence but is saturated with violence, from the Klan to his father's abuse of his mother to the pragmatic violence of slaughtering a hog. One of the more exciting elements of this book is Komunyakaa's skill in combining realistic description with startling and even puzzlingly abstract language.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Down Home Blues, April 21, 2002

By 

Lee Ann Roripaugh (Vermillion, South Dakota USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Magic City (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Magic City remains, perhaps, my favorite volume out of Yusef Komunyakaa's distinguished body of work. With his characteristic blues and jazz-inflected lyricism, Komunyakaa revisits the harrowing violence and racism of the deep south as viewed through a piercingly translucent prism of personal memory. The poems making up this volume are in many respects a poetry of witness, and the eyes through which which this gritty psychic landscape is revealed to the reader penetrate various scenes of troubled family life, poverty, violence and racism with a razor-sharp clarity rife with anger, sorrow, and beauty. Ranging in age from childhood to young adulthood, the speakers, or witnesses, in these poems see through eyes that are simultaneously innocent and jaded, naive and urbane, unflinchingly tough and lyrically sensitive. These are unforgettable poems. Like good blues, they cut right down to the bone.