Poetry Books
10 Tongues: Poems
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Manufacturer: Three Conditions Press
Author: Reginald Harris, Therese Capal
Publisher: Three Conditions Press
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Our Price:
You Save: $ 12.95 ( 100% )
Manufacturer: Three Conditions Press
Author: Reginald Harris, Therese Capal
Publisher: Three Conditions Press
Average Customer Rating:
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10 Tongues: Poems Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN: 9780972124102
ISBN: 0972124101
Label: Three Conditions Press
Manufacturer: Three Conditions Press
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 60
Publication Date: 2003-04-01
Publisher: Three Conditions Press
Studio: Three Conditions Press
Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN: 9780972124102
ISBN: 0972124101
Label: Three Conditions Press
Manufacturer: Three Conditions Press
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 60
Publication Date: 2003-04-01
Publisher: Three Conditions Press
Studio: Three Conditions Press
Editorial Review of 10 Tongues: Poems
10 Tongues, Reginald Harris's debut book of poetry, is filled with variations in mood and voice that are honest and courageous. Compelling and musically rich, these accessible verses from an African-American gay male move across the lines of race and sexuality to sing of family, identity, physical and sensual love, giving deep cadence to the images that haunt daily life.
Customer Reviews of 10 Tongues: Poems
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Kudos to Mr. Harris! Deserving of every accolade...
Review: This is a book evoking deep, warm, sometimes painful, but ultimately comforting emotions. Ten Tongues reminds me of a well-orchestrated first album that identifies a great talent and is full of promises for what future work by this author will hold. This book will travel well through time, and deserves every accolade and award.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Memory and Inspiration
Review: Ten Tongues is a book about secrets. More than the scene of autobiographical confession, it's a delicious, and sometimes painful, invitation to remember, muse, forget, and feel. "Don't," for example, warns us not to "Ask the body what it wishes for, the longings unencumbered by restriction" (lines 1-2). But the body remembers forgotten pleasures, departed friend and lovers, "All the thousands / gone" ("From the City of the Dead" 2-3).
Not only are we enjoined to mourn the passing of gay compatriots, but we are also invited to reflect on how a racialized economy ravages familial affect. "What My Fathers Taught Me" depicts how the relentless grind of labor exhausts affection: "Eat. / Watch TV / Say nothing. Fall asleep. Repeat / . . . / Call it love" (10-12). But to read this work solely as an act of mourning is to miss the hopeful trajectory it maps. Poems such as "1967 Saturday Nights" and "My Grandmother's Roses" muse on the material legacies of shared music and flowers that bind families together. As the poet reveals his secrets, we recognize our own family secrets, at times with a sense of wonder at other times with a sense of shame. The responses the poems elicit allow us to be neither voyeurs nor eavesdroppers.
"Prelude to a Saturday Night" opens the second section with a fierceness that recalls Assotto Saint and Essex Hemphill. The poem's subject "Lock[s] the working week / away" (1-2), and takes his rightful position among "The stars," accepting homage as his due. For me, this poem brought to mind the hopes, dreams, and ambitions articulated so powerfully in Jenny Livingstone's Paris is Burning and Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied. It captures the ambivalently pleasurable position of one caught between a foolish bravado and a necessary courage, perhaps the always inevitable position the black gay man must inhabit. Desire and discovery abrade against the ghastly legacies of AIDS in the collection's second section, which oscillates among the promises, threats, and pleasures of the flesh.
The third and final section of Ten Tongues sweetly brings it all home. Against the dark histories, the tales of loss and disease, violence and despair, we are invited to believe in, partake of, a quiet intimacy. In my favorite poem, for example, Harris enjoins us "To forget you have a past" (1), "To forget you are a you To think / in couples pairs dualities" (4-5). It is a mark, I think, of the incredible generosity of the collection that this injunction "to forget" does not feel exclusionary. It is not the poet flaunting his lover, his relationship, his connections before his readers; nor is it a retreat into a private domestic space, a haven away from the politics and conflicts that mark the other sections. It articulates, instead, the utopian hopes that drive and inspire poetry and politics, love and lust, writing and activism. As the final words of Ten Tongues have it, that is "Sometimes Enough."
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: TEN TONGUES
Review: A strong debut volume by this terrific poet, published by Baltimore-based Three Conditions Press. Harris's poems combine honesty and elegance, rapture and turmoil, wonder and insight, frequently speaking from the perspective of an African-American gay man. They express identity, encompass history, but above all communicate the experiences of a poet leading an emotionally and imaginatively full life in today's America.
Review Summary: Kudos to Mr. Harris! Deserving of every accolade...
Review: This is a book evoking deep, warm, sometimes painful, but ultimately comforting emotions. Ten Tongues reminds me of a well-orchestrated first album that identifies a great talent and is full of promises for what future work by this author will hold. This book will travel well through time, and deserves every accolade and award.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Memory and Inspiration
Review: Ten Tongues is a book about secrets. More than the scene of autobiographical confession, it's a delicious, and sometimes painful, invitation to remember, muse, forget, and feel. "Don't," for example, warns us not to "Ask the body what it wishes for, the longings unencumbered by restriction" (lines 1-2). But the body remembers forgotten pleasures, departed friend and lovers, "All the thousands / gone" ("From the City of the Dead" 2-3).
Not only are we enjoined to mourn the passing of gay compatriots, but we are also invited to reflect on how a racialized economy ravages familial affect. "What My Fathers Taught Me" depicts how the relentless grind of labor exhausts affection: "Eat. / Watch TV / Say nothing. Fall asleep. Repeat / . . . / Call it love" (10-12). But to read this work solely as an act of mourning is to miss the hopeful trajectory it maps. Poems such as "1967 Saturday Nights" and "My Grandmother's Roses" muse on the material legacies of shared music and flowers that bind families together. As the poet reveals his secrets, we recognize our own family secrets, at times with a sense of wonder at other times with a sense of shame. The responses the poems elicit allow us to be neither voyeurs nor eavesdroppers.
"Prelude to a Saturday Night" opens the second section with a fierceness that recalls Assotto Saint and Essex Hemphill. The poem's subject "Lock[s] the working week / away" (1-2), and takes his rightful position among "The stars," accepting homage as his due. For me, this poem brought to mind the hopes, dreams, and ambitions articulated so powerfully in Jenny Livingstone's Paris is Burning and Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied. It captures the ambivalently pleasurable position of one caught between a foolish bravado and a necessary courage, perhaps the always inevitable position the black gay man must inhabit. Desire and discovery abrade against the ghastly legacies of AIDS in the collection's second section, which oscillates among the promises, threats, and pleasures of the flesh.
The third and final section of Ten Tongues sweetly brings it all home. Against the dark histories, the tales of loss and disease, violence and despair, we are invited to believe in, partake of, a quiet intimacy. In my favorite poem, for example, Harris enjoins us "To forget you have a past" (1), "To forget you are a you To think / in couples pairs dualities" (4-5). It is a mark, I think, of the incredible generosity of the collection that this injunction "to forget" does not feel exclusionary. It is not the poet flaunting his lover, his relationship, his connections before his readers; nor is it a retreat into a private domestic space, a haven away from the politics and conflicts that mark the other sections. It articulates, instead, the utopian hopes that drive and inspire poetry and politics, love and lust, writing and activism. As the final words of Ten Tongues have it, that is "Sometimes Enough."
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: TEN TONGUES
Review: A strong debut volume by this terrific poet, published by Baltimore-based Three Conditions Press. Harris's poems combine honesty and elegance, rapture and turmoil, wonder and insight, frequently speaking from the perspective of an African-American gay man. They express identity, encompass history, but above all communicate the experiences of a poet leading an emotionally and imaginatively full life in today's America.
These poems also teach well as examples of demanding yet accessible contemporary poetry, with students responding earnestly and enthusiastically to Harris's art.