Warhorses
Poems
By Yusef Komunyakaa
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Hardcover, 9780374286439, 96pp.)
Publication Date: September 30, 2008
Other Editions of This Title: Paperback
Categories: American - General
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This powerful new collection of Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetry delves into an age of war and conflict, both global and internal, racial and sexual. “Sweetheart, was I talking war in my sleep / again?” he asks, and the question is hardly moot: “Sometimes I hold you like Achilles’ / shield,” and indeed all relationships, in this telling, are sites of violence and battle. His line is longer and looser than in Taboo and Talking Dirty to the Gods, and in long poems like “The Autobiography of My Alter Ego” he sounds almost breathless, an exhausted, desperate prophet. Warhorses is the stunning work of a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet who never ceases to challenge and delight his readers.
Yusef Komunyakaa’s twelve books of poems include Taboo (FSG, 2004) and Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at Princeton University.
Praise for Taboo: “[Taboo] call[s] to mind Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman—the private gaze and the civic drum, purifying language, purifying history.” —DARRYL LORENZO WELLINGTON, The Washington Post Book World “Verses that practically sizzle and spark with intelligence . . . Komunyakaa thinks like a scholar and writes like a jazz musician.” —JOHN FREEMAN, The Philadelphia Inquirer
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