The fourth collection of poetry from the literary and cultural
critic Fred Moten, "B Jenkins" is named after the poet's mother,
who passed away in 2000. It is both an elegy and an inquiry into
many of the themes that Moten has explored throughout his career:
language, music, performance, improvisation, and the black radical
aesthetic and political tradition. In Moten's verse, the arts,
scholarship, and activism intertwine. Cadences echo from his
mother's Arkansas home through African American history and
avant-garde jazz riffs. Formal innovations suggest the ways that
words, sounds, and music give way to one another.
The first and last poems in the collection are explicitly
devoted to Moten's mother; the others relate more obliquely to her
life and legacy. They invoke performers, writers, artists, and
thinkers including not only James Baldwin, Roland Barthes,
Frederick Douglass, Billie Holiday, Audre Lorde, Charlie Parker,
and Cecil Taylor, but also contemporary scholars of race, affect,
and queer theory. The book concludes with an interview conducted by
Charles Henry Rowell, the editor of the journal "Callaloo." Rowell
elicits Moten's thoughts on the relation of his poetry to theory,
music, and African American vernacular culture.
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