Talking Dirty to the Gods: Poems

by Yusef Komunyakaa

Book Overview

A daredevil poetic achievement from a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Yusef Komunyakaa's Talking Dirty to the Gods was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award

. . . A god isn't worth
A drop of water in the hell of his good

Imagination, if we can't curse
Sunsets & threaten to forsake him
In his storehouse of belladonna,
Tiger hornets, & snakebites.
--from "Meditations in a Swine Yard"

No...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374527938
• ISBN13: 9780374527938
• Release Date: September 2001
• Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.3" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

The Poet Walks Through all of Western Civilization

Where Baraka, as a nationalist poet, looked for new forms from Africa to escape the prejudiced West, Yusef K appropriates all of Western culture with aplomb, dealing with the slave societies of the Greek and Romans and their Gods as well as walking through the middle ages and talking about current times. His knowledge of ancient history is impressive. The poems work on many levels, like the poem "Racoons," which is about hunting these animals with dogs but also about, horribly, using the same techniques to hunt down runaway slaves in the slave south. No book I know deals so powerfully with the long history of large scale slavery in Western history.

I should have bought this book...

I picked it up at the book store and was flipping through it. Wow! Seemed to be a little more accessible than some of Komunyakaa's other work, but just as powerful if not more so.