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Poetry that acts as a fierce and loving resistance to violence
Winner of Hurston/Wright Foundation's Legacy Award for Poetry, given by the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, 2018
Art can't shield our bodies or stabilize the earth's climate, but Evie Shockley's semiautomatic insists that it can feed the spirit and reawaken the imagination. The volume responds primarily to the twenty-first century's inescapable evidence of the terms of black life—not so much new as newly visible. The poems trace a whole web of connections between the kinds of violence that affect people across the racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, national, and linguistic boundaries that do and do not divide us. How do we protect our humanity, our ability to feel deeply and think freely, in the face of a seemingly endless onslaught of physical, social, and environmental abuses? Where do we find language to describe, process, and check the attacks and injuries we see and suffer? What actions can break us out of the soul-numbing cycle of emotions, moving through outrage, mourning, and despair, again and again? In poems that span fragment to narrative and quiz to constraint, from procedure to prose and sequence to song, semiautomatic culls past and present for guides to a hoped-for future.
that's a rap (sheet music for alphabet street)
I. O THE TIMES
weather or not
the way we live now ::
buried truths
what's not to liken?
playing with fire
mirror and canvas
if a junco
banking on amnesia
a one-act play
in a no-win zone
corrective rape (or, i'm here to help)
Sex Trafficking Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in the USA (or, The Nation's Plague in Plain Sight)
II. THE TOPSY SUITE
studies in antebellum literature (or, topsy-turvy)
topsy's notes on taxonomy
topsy talks about her role
from topsy in wonderland
["NOW, READER . . ."]
III. REFRAIN
a-lyrical ballad (or, how america reminds us of the value of family)
keep your eye on
haibun for a parasitic pre-apocalyptic blues
sore score
in the california mountains, far from shelby / county, alabama and even farther from / the supreme court building, the black poet / seeks the low-down from a kindred entity
i declare war
acrobatic
song in the back yard
legend
legit-i-mate
improphised
cogito ergo loquor
philosophically immune
"the people want the regime to fall"
a dark scrawl
a one-act play
fukushima blues
jim crow stole my father's wings
supply and demand
["STOP : MEET WITH ME HERE . . ."]
IV. BLUES MODALITY
preface to a twenty-first-century survival guide
senzo
lotto motto
a one-act play
to be continued blues
of speech
the obsolete army
truth in advertising
upon this plot
how long has this jayne been gone?
du bois in ghana
cosmography
circe / odysseus / black odysseys (a remix-collage)
notes
acknowledgments
EVIE SHOCKLEY is the author of several collections of poetry, including a half-red sea and the new black. She has won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and fellowships from Cave Canem, MacDowell, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. She currently is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University New Brunswick.
"Evie Shockley burns up the page with her new collection.... semiautomatic is a 21st century survival guide, fierce and full of compassion."
~Diana Whitney, San Francisco Chronicle
"[N]otable not only for the way it navigates questions of identity & politics, but for the variety & virtuosity of its use of form."
~Robert Archambeau, The Hudson Review
"In semiautomatic, a 2018 Pulitzer finalist and the recent winner of the Hurston/Wright Award for Poetry, Evie Shockley repurposes literary and musical modes from across centuries of African-American and diasporic traditions. Given the choice between formal flawlessness and page-spanning sprawls, between autobiographical revelation and collective outcry, she welcomes the self-contradictions of being all the above."
~Christopher Spaide, LA Review of Books
"Evie Shockley suggests that poetry is necessary to seeing, surviving with equilibrium and wholeness in this period's vital and precarious junctures. The poems in semiautomatic are on fire. This will make an excellent source book of poetic form and historically grounded black aesthetics for the classroom."
~Erica Hunt, Long Island University
"There is no keener mind in American poetry than Shockley's, with her quick turns and inflections, slipping between subjectivity and documentary, between verse and refrain. Her poems engage—politically, formally, historically, profoundly—with the redistribution of power through language. Read this book and get shook."
~D. A. Powell
"This is an extraordinary, wonderful book. Evie Shockley is a great black poet. I know she might not put it that way, and sees all of what's problematic in my putting it that way. Her greatness is in that, too. She makes revolution irresistible just like she heard we should."
~Fred Moten, author of The Little Edges
"Evie Shockley's semiautomatic goes beyond mere weaponry. This book is revelatory. A tool in the chest of cultural workers, a vocabulary that resists decoration; this is self-portraiture and truth-telling at its best. From her epic 'the topsy suite' to her one-acts (a new form), through her fearless lens and appropriation of authorities, there's no level of denial or proof-vest that will protect you from Shockley's poetry. You can run, Reader, but you will not be able to look the other way."
~Willie Perdomo, author of The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon
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