Nod House Pa

With Nathaniel Mackey'¬"s fifth collection of poems, Nod House, we witness a confluence of music and meaning unprecedented in American poetry. Mackey'¬"s art continues to push the envelope of what is possible to map and remap through words in sounds and sounds in words. Picking up with Nub'¬"s disintegration at the end of his previous collection '¬ ; the National Book Award'¬ ;winning Splay Anthem '¬ ; we follow a traveler and a tribe of travelers ensconced in myth and history as Mackey continues to weave his precisely measured music with two ongoing serial poems, Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu. The collec- tion is divided into two sections, both titled '¬SQuag,'¬ and it is this double-Quag ('¬SNub'¬"s new colony Quag'¬ or Qraq or Ouab'¬"da or Quaph . . .) that the tribe is exiled in, worlds within alternate worlds where names and places are ever-shifting, and dreamlessness reigns. From the pyramids to the projects, Ivory Coast to Lone Coast, Lagos to Stick City, amidst chorusing horns and star-spar lightning, Nod House ('¬SNub'¬"s / new / address'¬) unfolds as gorgeous eulogy, copla-cuts of deep song, the long elegiac march of '¬Sday after day of the dead.'¬