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Kong and Other Works Paperback – March 15, 2009

by Pamela Sneed (Author)

4.0 1 rating

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Poetry. African American Studies. Gay and Lesbian Studies. Pamela Sneed offers readers a tremendous gift in the collection KONG AND OTHER WORKS. These poems are histories, written but mainly unwritten, showing how social movements constructed around race, gender, and sexuality impact the individual. It is about current events, family, ancestors and pioneers, healing, hope, and love. KONG shifts effortlessly between the comedic and the critical while never losing sight of the author's aim: to offer a work that is transformative, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. Primarily inspired by Sneed's two trips to Ghana, West Africa, KONG uses both the film King Kong and the journey of an African man kidnapped from his homeland as metaphors. At its heart, KONG is a resilient protest work, and a luminescent and universal call for freedom.

Editorial Reviews

Review

With Kong, Pamela Sneed has given us a gorgeous geography of her wanderings through literature and history, travel and memoir. She is a writer for the future, in that she defies genre. --Hilton Als, Staff Writer, The New Yorker

[Her] words are life rafts, buoyed up by her anger and her compassion. We should cling to them until we see the shore. --Jewelle Gomez, Activist and Author of The Gilda Stories

When the bridges on your back have burned, when the thing dies by way of betrayal, disappointment, racism, lying, sexism, malnutrition, manipulation, immaturity, un-sophistication, tackiness, bullets, cancer, AIDS, poverty, slavery or genocide and the open casket reveals your lover, mother, brother, sister, boss, friend, comrade, savior, movement, hopefully like Sneed you kept a pen handy and you wrote about it all. Rose above it all. To be larger-than-life is not just about the exaggeration of fashion and affectation. It means that you have squared up to it when it showed up. Shouldered it. When the life-monkey on your back is love, you write KONG, something big and bad and historical and hysterical and sweeping and when it show up for you storied, miffed, mythed, psychically and astrally-projected, swinging limb-to-limb, it is the infallible poet that knows that it was you who brought it here, brought this giant of a book out by insisting that Sneed had to cross the middle passage chartered between you and her. --Marvin K. White, Author, Our Name Be Witness

About the Author

Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, performer, writer and actress. She is the author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery, published by Henry Holt (1998). Sneed has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Source, Time Out, VIBE, Karl Lagerfeld's Off the Record, and on the cover of New York Magazine. In 2001, 2002, and in 2005 she headlined the New Work Now Festival at Joe's Pub/Public Theater and performed before sold-out houses. Sneed is a recipient of the 2006 Baxten Award for Performance.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage Entity Press; First Edition (March 15, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 222 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 097529878X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0975298787
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.75 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #7,546,149 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,133 in Black & African American Poetry (Books)

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Erin Schmidt

Poetry that feels both intimate and erudite

Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2010

What Pamela Sneed does well in KONG & Other Works is making everything, absolutely everything, relevant. She can do this, because her overarching theme in these works is relationship. She identifies herself through the poems as a black lesbian college professor, a daughter, a lover, a student of history, and more. In all these capacities, she must negotiate relationships that are sometimes painful, sometimes pleasant, and sometimes a confusing mixture of the two.

Sneed is an exquisite observer of human interactions, whether they are the interactions between Africans kidnapped into slavery, between the characters in the Lord of the Rings films, or between her mother and her mother's Wal-Mart coworkers. It is from these interactions that Sneed's poetry draws its strength.

The title sequence of poems refers to various ways of looking at the classic film character King Kong, proving Sneed's gift is equally suited to lofty topics such as the incarceration of Nelson Mandela and to movies and television. Sneed takes the raw material of her life and spins it into poetry that feels both intimate and erudite.