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Description
Now in paperback, a haunting chorus of voices that tells the story of the captivity, education, language, hopes, dreams, and fight for freedom, of the African Americans abducted in the Amistad rebellion.
Based on the 1840 mutiny on board the slave ship Amistad, Ardency begins with "Buzzard," a sequence of poems told in the voice of the interpreter for the captive rebels, who were jailed in New Haven. In "Correspondence," we encounter the remarkable letters to John Quincy Adams and others that the captives wrote from jail. The book culminates in "Witness," a libretto chanted by Cinque, the rebel leader, who yearns for his family and freedom while eloquently evoking the Amistads' conversion and life in America. As Young conjures this array of characters, interweaving the liberation cry of Negro spirituals and the indoctrinating wordplay of American primers, he delivers his signature songlike immediacy at the service of an epic built on the ironies, violence, and virtues of American history.
About the Author
Kevin Young is an American poet heavily influenced by the poet Langston Hughes and the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Young graduated from Harvard College in 1992, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (1992-1994), and received his MFA from Brown University. While in Boston and Providence, he was part of the African-American poetry group, The Dark Room Collective.Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Young is the author ofMost Way Home,To Repel Ghosts,Jelly Roll,Black Maria,For The Confederate Dead,Dear Darkness, and editor ofGiant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers;Blues Poems; Jazz PoemsandJohn Berryman's Selected Poems.His Black Cat Blues, originally published inThe Virginia Quarterly Review, was included inThe Best American Poetry 2005. Young's poetry has appeared inThe New Yorker,Poetry Magazine,The Paris Review,Ploughshares, and other literary magazines. In 2007, he served as guest editor for an issue ofPloughshares. He has written on art and artists for museums in Los Angeles and Minneapolis.His 2003 book of poemsJelly Rollwas a finalist for the National Book Award.After stints at the University of Georgia and Indiana University, Young now teaches writing at Emory University, where he is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing, as well as the curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, a large collection of first and rare editions of poetry in English.
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