Customer Reviews

Zong! (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

"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.

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.

Although I understand the intellectual mission of rendering poetry from the law transcripts, it is hard to glean any emotion or meaning from the poems through the legal jargin, fractured lines, and abstract moans.

DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK. DO NOT BOTHER READING IT. it is a pretensious attempt to "make poetry." If the author were truly so intent on educating the public about the atrocities of the Zong! drownings, then she would have done a better job actually making an effort to write a cognizable, intelligent, linear piece of writing. This is a just a jumble of words and I can't for the life of me understand how it took seven years to write. M. Nourbese Philips is the paragon of writers who give poetry a bad reputation.