New and selected poems from the great Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
These songs run along dirt roads
& highways, crisscross lonely seas
& scale mountains, traverse skies
& underworlds of neon honkytonk,
Wherever blues dare to travel.
Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth brings together selected poems from the
past twenty years of Yusef Komunyakaa's work, as well as new poems from
the Pulitzer Prize winner. Komunyakaa's masterful, concise verse
conjures arresting images of peace and war, the natural power of the
earth and of love, his childhood in the American South and his service
in Vietnam, the ugly violence of racism in America, and the meaning of
power and morality.
The new poems in this collection add a new refrain to the jazz-inflected
rhythms of one of our "most significant and individual voices" (David
Wojahn, Poetry). Komunyakaa writes of a young man fashioning a
slingshot, workers who "honor the Earth by opening shine / inside the
soil," and the sounds of a saxophone filling a dim lounge in New Jersey.
As April Bernard wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "He refuses
to be trivial; and he even dares beauty."
Probably my favorite living poet. No one else taught me more about how
important it was to think about how words make people feel. It's not
enough for people to know something is true. They have to feel it's
true. --Ta-Nehisi Coates, The New York Times Style Magazine
