Can I read Congotronic (Kuhl House Poets) on EtoBox?

Congotronic (Kuhl House Poets) by Shane Book; Project Muse is a work of literary fiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Congotronic (Kuhl House Poets) about?

At once original, strange, funny, and unnerving, Shane Book's Congotronic takes the reader into unstable territory, where multiple layers of voice, diction, and music collide. Some of these poems have the sparse directness of a kind of bleak prayer; others mingle the earthbound rhythms of hip-hop with the will-to-transcendence of high Romanticism. Harnessing techniques of the cinematic and audio arts, Book's poems splice, sample, collage, and jump-cut language from an array of sources, including slave narratives, Western philosophy, hip hop lyrics, and the diaries of plantation owners. In fusing disparate texts, each poem in this collection attempts to create a community in language. Thus, at its core, the project is utopic-or more precisely, to borrow from Duke Ellington-the project is "blutopic." The book's anchoring series contains an apocryphal narrative grounded in the journey of the Middle Passage and an older mythic history from the West African epic of Sundiata. Here elements of Afrofuturism coagulate with an R & B grin as social forces challenge a sense of personhood, prompting free-jazz inflected conversations between the pieces of a shattered, polyvocal self. Here is a w

Who reads Congotronic (Kuhl House Poets)?

Author

Shane Book; Project Muse

Publisher

Iowa City: University of Iowa Press

Published

2014

Language

EN

ISBN

9781609383077

Category

work of literary fiction

Subjects

Literary Fiction, Poetry, Humanities

Rating

3.93 / 5 (24 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14