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The Perseverance
Overview
In the wake of his father's death, the speaker in Raymond Antrobus' The Perseverance travels to Barcelona. In Gaudi's Cathedral, he meditates on the idea of silence and sound, wondering whether acoustics really can bring us closer to God. Receiving information through his hearing aid technology, he considers how deaf people are included in this idea. "Even though," he says, "I have not heard / the golden decibel of angels, / I have been living in a noiseless / palace where the doorbell is pulsating / light and I am able to answer."
The Perseverance is a collection of poems examining a d/Deaf experience alongside meditations on loss, grief, education, and language, both spoken and signed. It is a book about communication and connection, about cultural inheritance, about identity in a hearing world that takes everything for granted, about the dangers we may find (both individually and as a society) if we fail to understand each other.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9781951142421
- ISBN-10: 195114242X
- Publisher: Tin House Books
- Publish Date: March 2021
- Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.35 pounds
- Page Count: 96
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Writing in a refreshingly defiant voice, Yemeni American poet Threa Almontaser offers a razor-sharp interrogation of home, gender and cultural norms in her first collection, The Wild Fox of Yemen. In “Muslim Girl with White Guys, Ending at the Edge of a Ridge,” Almontaser articulates the challenges of living between two cultures: “Neither muscle nor mouth / devoted to one way of speaking. Every language / I borrow from somewhere else.”
While addressing the generational differences and frictions that exist within her extended family, Almontaser reveals herself to be exceptional at playing with shape, manipulating a page’s white space in order to underscore her ideas. (The lines of “Feast, Beginning w/ a Kissed Blade” form the shape of a knife, crafted to conclude on a pinpoint.) Winner of the 2020 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, Almontaser’s daring debut both speaks to and transcends the times.
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A Louisiana native, Komunyakaa enlivens observations about youth, music, race, love and war with singular, spellbinding imagery. His poems capture the magnitude of everyday moments and the mysteries of the natural world. In “Slingshot”—as “summer rambles into a quiet / quantum of dogwood & gum”—a boy’s experiment with a homemade weapon proves to be transformative. In “Our Side of the Creek,” the poet is attuned to the ominous: “The Jim Crow birds sang / of persimmon & mayhaw / after a 12-gauge shotgun / sounded in the mossy woods.” Komunyakaa, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1994, writes majestic yet deeply human poems that make this a collection to savor.
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