Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Dialogues on Dance #5) [Hardcover]

Cornelius Eady (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

In Cornelius Eady's vibrant collection of poems, Victims ofthe Latest Dance Craze, it's usually Friday night and the spirit is alive with the longing, frenzy, and wonder of dancing. Eady locates the dance in a marvelous array of possibilities: April, Johnny in his red shoes, umbrellas and the wooden pillars that hold up the roof, lip synchers, boom box totcrs, gravity, lipstick, crows on a windy roof, the allnight clerk who "behind the bullet-proof glass sways his hips." Throughout, the language is accessible and direct, clean in spirit and statement, delightfully innocent and honest. He doesn't pretend to know all the answers to the pop of fingers or the beat's bop, and in "The Poetic Interpretation of the Twist" admits with adept understatemerit " - . . I am still confused by the mini-skirt /As well as the deep meaning of vinyl.. .Victims of the Latest Dance Craze is the 1985 Lamont Poetry Selection, a distinguished award for an author's second book of poems. The book is well-made and handsomely illustrated with glyphlike graphics by Susan Micklem. Ommation Press, the publisher, has a history of dedicating itself to poetry concerned with dance and Eady's text is the fifth in the press's Dialogues on Dance Series. Ommation's longstanding focus on poetry and dance has earned it a solid reputation among poets concerned with this synthesis of creative forms and readers should be similarly informed about this publisher's particular excellence. Worthy alone of the price of the book is the poem 'Jazz Dancer." Its obsessive celebration of the jazzman's "war against/the obvious" results in a praiseful litany as the poet enunciates a lovely catalogue of theories about air, motion, kisses, "long glances from across a ballroom" and "certain kinds of thirst." The poem's leaping connections harmoniously join an odd geography of emotional and physical material into a most beautiful composition. Throughout this volume each reader will discover special favorites from among the 29 individual poems. I highly recommend Eady's book. -- From Independent Publisher

Product Details

• Hardcover: 52 pages
• Publisher: Ommation Press; 1st edition (March 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0941240029
• ISBN-13: 978-0941240024
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,620,477 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

BIO

Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, NY, in 1954. He is the author of seven books of poetry; Kartunes, (Warthog Press, 1980), Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, (Ommation Press, 1986), winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets, The Gathering of My Name, (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1991), nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, You Don't Miss Your Water, (Henry Holt and Co., 1995), The Autobiography of a Jukebox (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1997), Brutal Imagination (Putnam, 2001), nominated for the National Book Award, and Hardheaded Weather; New and Selected Poems (April 2008, Putnam), nominated for the 2008 NAACP Image Award. He is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Literature (1985), a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, (1993), a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Traveling Scholarship to Tougaloo College in Mississippi (1992-1993), a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy, (1993), and The Prairie Schooner Strousse Award (1994). His work appears in many journals, magazines and the anthologies Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep, In Search of Color Everywhere, and The Vintage Anthology of African American Poetry, (1750-2000) ed. Michael S. Harper. In June 1997, an adapation of You Don't Miss Your Water was performed at the Vineyard Theatre, in New York City. In April 1999, Running Man, a music-theatre piece co-written with jazz musican Diedre Murray was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and awarded a 1999 Obie for best musical score and lead actor in a musical. He has taught poetry at SUNY Stony Brook, where he directed its Poetry Center, City College. Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, The Writer's Voice, The 92nd St Y, The College of William and Mary, and Sweet Briar College. With poet Toi Derricote, he is co-founder of Cave Canem, a summer workshop/retreat for African American poets. In January 2002, a production of Brutal Imagination (with a score by Diedre Murray) opened at the Vineyard Theatre, where and won the 2002 Oppenheimer award for the best first play by an American Playwright. At present he is Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.