Description
Winner of the Omnidawn Open
Selected by Arthur Sze
Poems that question how we connect with ourselves and each other across the vast gulf of history
Devonte Travels the Sorry Route explores how we manipulate language and form to create narratives of identity. These poems were generated in response to Brian Counihan’s painting, “Sorry Route,” and focus on an African American character named Devonte who traverses time and whose sense of identity is constantly being cut by historical events. Devonte embodies the blood of black folk and inhabits multiple dimensions, resisting attempts of containment.
Drawing on a “cartography of allusions” from Egyptian, Native American, Vodou, jazz, and Anansian sources, T.J. Anderson III explores what it means to be “a stalker of history” and writes with authenticity, mythic imagination, and verve. Devonte Travels the Sorry Route is a singular accomplishment that extends the range and enriches the depth of contemporary American poetry.
Arthur Sze, author of Compass Rose
Review
About the Author
Excerpt
T.J. Anderson III has degrees from University of Massachusetts at Boston, University of Michigan, and SUNY Binghamton. He is a former Fulbright Scholar at Cairo University and the author of Notes to Make the Sound Come Right: Four Innovators of Jazz Poetry, River to Cross, Cairo Workbook, the Spoken-Word CD, Blood Octave, and the chapbook At Last Round Up. He lives with his family in Roanoke, Virginia and teaches at Hollins University.
Murky with Delinquent Notes We Insist! Freedom Now Suite
But, I am looking
not at you but rather
through you
with your butter brimming Aunt Jemimas
in the dew-rag dawn
of maple syrup
slave shack to
log cabin to
shake master’s breakfast in a quake
in a Quaker Oats shuffle
a soufflé of indigo screams.
The whip of cane by sugar harvested. This machete to cut my way through
the dense verbiage of your language.
With your molars grinding the morning assault
of yet another
newspaper splattered with black body counts.
I got a shitload of loose coffee pebbles
that need to be reconciled.
I got Uncle Ben’s rice converted
to a Congo harvest ripe with severed hands.
I wield an incendiary device birthed from
glossaries of impending legislation afloat in
my speech.
I am a Blue
Mountain Maroon torching your
stereos
roasting your genital tongues.
I am just around the corner where
boys play hoop
& leave the ball midair
They are the basket weavers,
the showboaters,
tail spin and wolf
fake to the right
then the twirl behind
the back jazz body aesthetic
smoke and mirrors
Anansi’s arrival.
That’s the court
I pledge allegiance to.
I am looking beyond
the blind gloss of fruited plains
the huddled masses yearning
for holiday cakes
and fuel efficient ballads.
Take note, I sport a bandoleer
of guttural scat
staccatos of soaked Max sticks.
Baby, I’m a mean bone slinger
with an Abbey wail
and my cleanup will be messy.
