The Listening Poems [Paperback]

KYLE DARGAN's poetry collections include Logorrhea Dementia: A Self-Diagnosis (Georgia); Bouquet of Hungers (Georgia), which received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and The Listening (Georgia), which was a winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He is the former managing editor of Callaloo and the founder and current editor of POST NO ILLS magazine. He is an associate professor of literature and creative writing at American University.Kyle Dargan's debut collection of poetry, The Listening, searches through the cluttered surface of contemporary life to tune into the elemental sounds within the marrow of living/life. Throughout the collection, Dargan interweaves elements of his heritage with the present day—jazz influences blend with hip-hop; neoslave narratives run parallel with the intimate tale of civil rights leaders; post-9/11 America is juxtaposed with family portraits of the sixties and seventies—to reveal the continuous, though ever changing, music of the world around us. Whether capturing the famous Ali-Frazier fight in Manila or a trip to the local barbershop, Muddy Waters or boyhood blacktop games, Dargan gives voice to the most poignant and fleeting aspects of our everyday existence. With singular incisiveness and vigor, these poems act simultaneously as psalms and elegies, praising life at the same time they lament its inevitable passing.

What is this phat new thing in your hands? It's both antithetical and wide, wide open. It's right as mismatched sneakers: one foot stepping backward, the other forward. Kyle Dargan has built a shelter with the bricks of the best worlds. He's made a halfway house you won't be leaving soon. Settle in!

The intrepid, hybrid 'chronograffiti' of Kyle Dargan's The Listening bears the heft of its personal and cultural histories with llÓ&