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Yusef Komunyakaa has become one of America's most compelling poets. Pleasure Dome gathers over twenty-five years of work, including early uncollected poems and a rich selection of new poems.
Best known for Neon Vernacular, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994, and for Dien Cai Dau, a collection of poems chronicling his experiences as a journalist in Vietnam, Yusef Komunyakaa has become one of America's most compelling poets. Pleasure Dome gathers the poems in these two distinguished books and five others—over two and a half decades of Komunyakaa's work. In addition, Pleasure Dome includes 25 early, uncollected poems and a rich selection of 18 new poems.
New Poems
Early Uncollected
Dedications and Other Darkhorses
Lost in the Bonewheel Factory
Copacetic
Toys in a Field
I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head
Dien Cai Dau
February in Sydney
Magic City
Neon Vernacular
Thieves of Paradise
Index of titles and first lines
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA is a professor in the creative writing department at New York University. He has won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and many other awards for poetic achievement, including the 2001 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the 2004 Shelley Memorial Award, the Hanes Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Levinson Prize from Poetry Magazine, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
"Komunyakaa's poems sway with jazz-inflected rhythms. Short lines and percussive internal rhymes combine with sinuously stepped enjambment to give the poems a strongly musical movement."
~Ian Tromp, Times Literary Supplement
"The poems of Yusef Komunyakaa, all bearing his unique stamp of heartbreaking integrity, tower over the landscape of American poetry."
~Molly Peacock
""Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Komunyakaa's second book in less than a year attests to the protean nature of his poetic imagination and skills, his fluent creative energy, and his passion for living the examined life . . . Komunyakaa is emerging as one of the major American poets of our time.""
~Booklist
""Pleasure Dome is substantial, a comprehensive look at a significant poet's impressive career. Regular readers of Komunyakaa will find much of interest here—the book begins with a healthy selection of new poems, followed by a book-length group of the poet's early, uncollected work. a book impressive in its scope and volume, the life's work, thus far, of one of America's finer poets.""
~Virginia Quarterly Review
""Komunyakaa's poems sway with jazz-inflected rhythms. Short lines and percussive internal rhymes combine with sinuously stepped enjambment to give the poems a strongly musical movement.""
~Ian Tromp, Times Literary Supplement
""Komunyakaa certainly deserves this valedictory volume . . . [The new work] is really almost a short collection's worth of material. It's reminiscent of 1998's Thieves of Paradise with its heady mix of gothic foreboding, racial history and realpolitick, biblical and Attic allusion, and sexual longing . . . Most readers will want this book for its alternatingly erudite and feral energy and its truth-telling about Vietnam (see Dien Cai Dau and others) and America.""
~Publishers Weekly
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