Avalanche - Softcover

Troupe, Quincy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566890446 ISBN 13: 9781566890441

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 1996

Synopsis

A collection of poetry about men, women, jazz, and American life.

About this title

About the Author:

Featured on two PBS poetry series, Troupe is the author of seven volumes of poetry including Transcircularities, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and Minnesotabased Talking Volumes bookclub selection. In addition to children's books on Magic Johnson and Stevie Wonder, Troupe chronicled his friendship with Miles Davis in Miles and Me, soon to be a feature film.

From Publishers Weekly:

Troupe heaves a cold, smacking "rush of objects" down an American mountainside of dreams and injustices. A respected chronicler of the lives of James Baldwin and Miles Davis and the son of a prominent Negro league catcher, Troupe (Snake-Back Solos) is an innovator of form and tone who shifts quickly from a lofty, elegiac mode into burlesque or smoky, jazzed-down pop phraseology. He plays on history, "riffin' on in full of rain & pain/ spacin' on in on a sound/ like coltrane." But Troupe also registers history's price, as in repeated images of an old man-both perpetrator and victim-"holding his age tight as two opaque roses/ in cataracted eyes." Troupe is still at his best when he indulges in deep, obsessive curves into music: "caaa-rack// the assonance of sound breaking from ground/ breaking away from itself & found in the bounding syllables of snow/ moving now." He writes with unchecked expression, redundant and inclusive. If it were any more laden, Avalanche would be inchoate. Any less would be our loss.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1566890446
• ISBN 13: 9781566890441
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128
• Illustrator: Bedia José