Talking Dirty to the Gods Poems

A daredevil poetic achievement nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award . . . A god isn't worth A drop of water in the hell of his good Imagination, if we can't curse Sunsets & threaten to forsake him In his storehouse of belladonna, Tiger hornets, & snakebites. --from "Meditations in a Swine Yard" No turn in any life cycle is taboo as Yusef Komunyakaa examines the primal rituals shared by insects, animals, human beings, and deities inTalking Dirty to the Gods. From "Hearsay" to "Heresy," these 132 poems, each consisting of four quatrains, are framed by innuendo and lively satire. Komunyakaa looks to nature and configures his own paradigm, in which an event as commonplace as the jewel wasp laying an egg in a cockroach becomes every bit as grand as Zeus's infidelity. The formally rigorous collection is itself a design for a systematic cosmos, a world compressed but abundant in surprise and delight. Yusef Komunyakaawas born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1947. His eleven books of poems includeNeon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. A professor in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, Komunyakaa received the 2004 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. These prismatic lyricsso solidly constructed, so thematically expansivespeak of, and for, the primal rituals and ribald taboos shared by insects, animals, human beings, and deities. "Komunyakaa's mournful surrealism seems to have found a perfect mathematical embodiment," observedThe New Yorker. "[This book] comprises 132 poems of four four-line stanzas. These are poems about the uncontrollable human and natural mysteries, and they are made sharper and more mysterious by the eternal recurrence of the stanzaic structure. Komunyakaa's lexical and historical range is large, and his improvisations move effortlessly from Theocritus to Rimbaud, Chet Baker, and the Black Panthers." "These are poems about the uncontrollable human and natural mysteries, and they are made sharper and more mysterious by the eternal recurrence of [this book's] stanzaic structure. Komunyakaa's lexical and historical range is large, and his improvisations move effortlessly from Theocritus to Rimbaud, Chet Baker, and the Black Panthers."The New Yorker "Komunyakaa wonderfully achieves the combined mischief and moralizing of Catullus, one of his acknowledged heroes . . . He refuses to be trivial; and he even dares beauty."April Bernard,The New York Times Book Review "[This] new volume is remarkable exactly because it's a category killer, a sustained anti-hierarchy. The hundred-plus poems speak equally to gods and maggots, to the mythical reaches of history, and to erotic immediacy . . . [Komunyakaa] discovers a spirited materialism, the landscape pantheistically aglow, the prime matter seemingly always at hand."Village Voice Literary Supplement(from the citation as one of the 25 Favorite Books of 2000)

Yusef Komunyakaa was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1947. His eleven books of poems include Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. He is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.