Congotronic

by Shane Book

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Pub Date Sep 01 2014 | Archive Date Jun 11 2015

University of Iowa Press | Kuhl House Poets

Description

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 world poet of the Sonic Global South sheathed in a Northern Hemispheric glow suit, high “on Coltrane, on Zeus” but also on the old and new schools of Descartes, M.I.A., Cecil Taylor, Gilbert Ryle, Freud, and Jay Z, among others—or as one poem puts it, the “aural truths.”

Advance Praise

“Welcome to the bounding dream and song of Congotronic! This kind of visionary music will ‘leave every jaw dropped, cocked and locked.’ It’s as if John Berryman was alive in the spiral of Shane Book’s ear. These are oral, oracular, and thoroughly original poems. Anyone who enters them will be transformed.”—Terrance Hayes, author, Lighthead

“With an immediate and sustaining wit, and all fingers on the pulse of language, Shane Book seeks to blow the ghost out of the machine and the dust off of history. No mind-body split here; instead a learned, restive, blues-based exploration of poetic modes and poetic potentialities, of layered identities and polyvocal echoes.”—Michael Palmer, author,Thread

“Shane Book crosses tremendous territory—from the social through the political and the philosophical to the sheerly imaginative; it’s travel in every sense of the word, motivated by the urgency of pluralistic experience, of the imperative to witness. And to bring that witnessing to life, to speak out, which he does with a marvelous range of dictions, vernaculars, and linguistic stances—making voice an active, even acrobatic thing. He performs a stunning high-wire act that manages to remain extremely well-grounded at the same time.”—Cole Swensen, author, The Book of a Hundred Hands

Available Editions

EDITION	Paperback
ISBN	9781609383077
PRICE	$18.50 (USD)

Additional Information

Average rating from 14 members

Featured Reviews

Joseph S, Reviewer

Congotronic by Shane Book is a collection of unique poetry. Book is the author of Ceiling of Sticks. He is a graduate of New York University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

I picked up Congotronic because it was published by the University of Iowa Press, and I have not been disappointed by any of the works they have published. Congotronic, however, is very much out of my usual element of poetry. With no introduction, except for the cover art which lead me to think possibly West Africa, maybe Haiti, or again maybe big city America in the 1970s. The answer I received was “Yes.” The poetry seemed to capture all of that and more. There is imagery of an African fishing village in "Worldtown". “Mack Daddy Manifesto” blends Engels and Marx into the street life of rap:

Real, real soon as in yester-after-noon, I need to step to your crib, and tell you how I feel the proletarians have nothing to lose but their world to win.

and into “Bronze Age”

The revolution?
Through our high powered geigers: twin-stroke underbuzz of revolution’s engine; the puttering

three-wheeled revolution; the landless campesinos beaten by pots and pans into land and nothing we could do. They resented our husks.

Sometimes the words flow with a rhythm of a rap, other times they flow like cut-up, making the read stop, think, and reorganize the words he read. What is not lacking is imagery and message regardless of the topic. There is that edge of resistance, pride, and that reminder much like the iconic image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos in Mexico City in 1968. There is power in the words, and that power seems to speak louder as proper English drifts into street slang. There is that feeling of pride and power that rose in the 1970s and now fades with illusion of equality. An excellent and unique collection poetry.

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Sam S, Reviewer

The words wash over you, but you don't necessarily understand all the meanings. Perhaps you just don't know enough, or it operates on a frequency well below ordinary awareness to seep into your consciousness. In any case, you ride on through because the words keep coming in a discordant yet beautifully maintained secret rhythm.

Irreverent but soulful, hearkening to a lost past and an equally lost present, Congotronic fuses the old with the new to create a future of thoughts boiling in the minds of its readers.

You drown in it and before you know it, you've finished the book.