In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship's owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert--the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves--Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.
Zong! (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"At times I'm uncomfortable with both poetry and history, but then a book like Zong! comes along and reminds me how the lyric can shake up history's limited logics and history can shake up poetry's occasional evasive sheen."--Jill Magi, Poetry Project Newsletter
"...as Philip emphasizes, the story of the Zong is ultimately a story that can only be told by not telling. So even in the sea of words that fill up the final pages of Zong!, the registers of silence that mark the text are resounding." --Kate Eichorn, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics
"Nourbese-Philip cannot not 'create' a story, even against her own intentions to 'merely' document." "...she treats each page as a field, a canvas--more accurately, the sea. The visual effect of viewing so many de-worded letters, de-sentenced words is astonishing; one seems to be looking at bodies in the ocean, their cries mere noise, sounds that only occasionally coalesce into words, phrases, sentences."--Tyrone Williams, African American Review
"...as Philip emphasizes, the story of the Zong is ultimately a story that can only be told by not telling. So even in the sea of words that fill up the final pages of Zong!, the registers of silence that mark the text are resounding." --Kate Eichorn, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics
"Nourbese-Philip cannot not 'create' a story, even against her own intentions to 'merely' document." "...she treats each page as a field, a canvas--more accurately, the sea. The visual effect of viewing so many de-worded letters, de-sentenced words is astonishing; one seems to be looking at bodies in the ocean, their cries mere noise, sounds that only occasionally coalesce into words, phrases, sentences."--Tyrone Williams, African American Review
Review
"A brash, unsettling book, Zong! wants to chant or shout history down, shut history up. It not only laments and mimics history's unreason but, verisimilar and retributive both, deranges history, as if to reorder its linguistic protocols might undo or redo history itself. Fretful, possessed, obsessed, upset, curse and homeopathy, both, it visits a breathtaking run of glossolalic scat upon historical trauma." (Nathaniel Mackay, author of Bass Cathedral )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Major Work of 21st Century Poetry and Consciousness,
This review is from: Zong! (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Hardcover)
Anyone who actually spends the time to read this work will know how genius Philip's work and invention towards speaking about "what cannot be give voice to". Unless you have a completely singular and static identity/POV you will be moved by this book.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
brilliant & necessary,
By
This review is from: Zong! (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Hardcover)
"But this is a story that can only be told by not telling...." With this enormously important book M. NourbSe Philip charts a fearless, moving, and gorgeous trajectory across the unspeakable. The book length poem honors a true event (the 18th century murder of over 150 slaves, thrown overboard for the insurance) while resisting and refreshing the language of the original report of the event (a legal document). Engaging a tragedy, in which the meaningful fact of humanity was not recognized, the poet refuses to supply sense, asking her reader to work with her to understand the structure of understanding itself. Fragments and associative leaps make the reading of this text a powerful experience of otherness, while her extraordinary music resonates in the heart, so that the poem finally comes from both within and without. One of the absolutely essential books.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful.,
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This review is from: Zong! (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Hardcover)
Please disregard the negative comments. This book is an accomplishment plain and simple. I would recommend reading the essays in the back before reading her poetry--they will provide much needed context.
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Inside This Book
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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs):
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neg roes, story that cannot, story that must, dear ruth Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Lord Mansfield, Captain Collingwood, Legal Report Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Surprise Me!
neg roes, story that cannot, story that must, dear ruth Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Lord Mansfield, Captain Collingwood, Legal Report Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Surprise Me!
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