Yusef Komunyakaa

Memories and history combine in these poems about the Vietnam War.

This is 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.

A collection of poems from the author's earlier books combined with a dozen new poems interweave memory and history.

Written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, this title provides the dramatic adaptation of Gilgamesh, a classic Sumerian legend.

With the allusive leaps and improvisational chops of a jazz soloist, Yusef Komunyakaa is our great poet of connectivity--the secret blood that links slave and master, explorer and native, stranger and brother. InTaboohe examines the role of blacks in Western history, and how these roles are portrayed in art and literature. In taut, meticulously crafted three-line stanzas, Rubens paints his wife looking longingly at a black servant; Aphra Behn writesOroonoko"as if she'd rehearsed it/for years in her spleen"; and in Monticello, Thomas Jefferson is "still/at his neo-classical desk/musing, but we know his mind/is brushing aside abstractions/so his hands can touch flesh."Taboois the powerful first book in a new trilogy by a Pulitzer Prize-winnin g poet whose work never ceases to challenge and delight his readers.

A collection of poems by Yusef Komunyakaa that explores the complexities of culture and its relation to artifact and place.