Literary Criticism. African American and Caribbean Studies. Kamau Brathwiate's CONVERSATIONS WITH NATHANIEL MACKEY is based on the transcript of his discussion with Nathaniel Mackey at Poet's House in New York City. Brathwaite expansively elaborates on Mackey's (and audience member's) knowledgeable inquiries; his answers are layered with subsequent ruminations arising from his lifelong engagement with world literature and expressive cultures. A multiphasic drift, CONVERSATIONS WITH NATHANIEL MACKEY combines elements of biography and autobiography with poetic discourse on Caribbean literary history and negative effects of colonial domination. Brathwaite splices dialog with poetry, criticism, and instrictive imaginary voices in his now distinct and characteristic Sycorax 'video style' format. Both Brathwaite and Mackey have several titles carried by SPD. Mackey's ERODING WITNESS is newly available, along with WHATSAID SERIF (City Lights) and DJOBOT BAGHOSTUS'S RUN (Sun & Moon) Brathwaite's BLAC

Poetry. African & African American Studies. "If 'I can't breathe' seems to have become the awful refrain of the age, a repeated corroboration of expendability and helplessness, Mackey reminds us that black culture has long been imbued with a profound sense of the fragility of life. The 'radical pneumaticism' of black music--in which saxophonists such as Ben Webster and Sonny Rollins extravagantly foreground the mechanics of their breathing as they play, as though to 'insist upon and belabor' the indispensability of respiration--is not only an aesthetics but also a political commentary on social precarity. Compact and muted as it may be, how can Mackey's lecture be described as anything other than breathtaking, when it forces us to 'hover,' to pause, to wonder at the 'transient boon' of the next breath we're about to take?"--Brent Hayes Edwards

An outstanding anthology in which notable musicians, artists, scientists, thinkers, poets, and more—from Gustavo Dudamel and Carrie Mae Weems to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Paul Muldoon—explore the influence of music on their lives and work Contributors include: Laurie Anderson ● Jamie Barton ● Daphne A. Brooks ● Edgar Choueiri ● Jeff Dolven ● Gustavo Dudamel ● Edward Dusinberre ● Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim ● Frank Gehry ● James Ginsburg ● Ruth Bader Ginsburg ● Jane Hirshfield ● Pico Iyer ● Alexander Kluge ● Nathaniel Mackey ● Maureen N. McLane ● Alicia Hall Moran ● Jason Moran ● Paul Muldoon ● Elaine Pagels ● Robert Pinsky ● Richard Powers ● Brian Seibert ● Arnold Steinhardt ● Susan Stewart ● Abigail Washburn ● Carrie Mae Weems ● Susan Wheeler ● C. K. Williams ● Wu Fei What happens when extraordinary creative spirits—musicians, poets, critics, and scholars, as well as an architect, a visual artist, a filmmaker, a scientist, and a legendary Supreme Court justice—are asked to reflect on their favorite music? The result is Ways of Hearing, a diverse collection that explores the ways music shapes us and our shared culture. These acts of musical witness bear fruit through personal essays, conversations and interviews, improvisatory meditations, poetry, and visual art. They sound the depths of a remarkable range of musical genres, including opera, jazz, bluegrass, and concert music both classical and contemporary. This expansive volume spans styles and subjects, including Pico Iyer’s meditations on Handel, Arnold Steinhardt’s thoughts on Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, and Laurie Anderson and Edgar Choueiri’s manifesto for spatial music. Richard Powers discusses the one thing about music he’s never told anyone, Daphne Brooks draws sonic connections between Toni Morrison and Cécile McLorin Salvant, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg reveals what she thinks is the sexiest duet in opera. Poems interspersed throughout further expand how we can imagine and respond to music. Ways of Hearing is a book for our times that celebrates the infinite ways music enhances our lives.

Poetry. Reprint of Nathanial Mackey's first book of poetry, selected by Michael Harper in 1985 as a winner of the National Poetry Series, and published by University of Illinois Press. With a new preface by Joseph Donahue.

A new volume of the singular, ongoing, great American jazz novel Nathaniel Mackey’s Late Arcade opens in Los Angeles. A musician known only as N. writes the first of a series of letters to the enigmatic Angel of Dust. N.’s jazz sextet, Molimo m’Atet, has just rehearsed a new tune: the horn players read from The Egyptian Book of the Dead with lips clothespinned shut, while the rest of the band struts and saunters in a cosmic hymn to the sun god Ra. N. ends this breathless session by sending the Angel of Dust a cassette tape of their rehearsal. Over the next nine months, N.’s epistolary narration follows the musical goings-on of the ensemble. N. suffers from what he calls “cowrie shell at- tacks”—oil spills, N.’s memory of his mother’s melancholy musical Sundays— which all becomes the source of fresh artistic invention. Here is the newest installment of the National Book Award-winner Nathaniel Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, the great American jazz novel of “exquisite rhythmic lyricism” (Bookforum).

In a stunning new collection of poems of transport and transcendence, African-American poet Nathaniel Mackey's "asthmatic song of aspiration" scuttles across cultures and histories--from America to Andalucía, from Ethiopia to Vienna--in a sexy, beautiful adaptive dance.

School of Udhra takes its title from the Bedouin poetic tradition associated with the seventh-century Arab poet Djamil, the Udhrite school of poets who, "when loving die." Bedouin tradition, however, is only one of the strands of world revery these poems have recourse to. They obey a "bedouin" impulse of their own-fugitive, moving on, nomadic. Ogo the fox, the Dogon avatar of singleness and unrest, runs throughout, crossing and recrossing divided ground, primal isolate, insistent within the book's cross-cultural weave. The poems track variances of union and disunion- social, sexual, mystic, mythic- both formally and in their content. They return rhapsody to its root sense: stitching together. Threads ranging through ancient Egypt, shamanic Siberia, Rastafarian Jamaica, and elsewhere figure in, inflected by conjunctive and disjunctive cadences inspired by jazz, Gnaoua trance-chant, cante jondo, and other musics.