"Alpha"-the beginning; the first letter of the military
alphabet; the highest rank in a dominance hierarchy; being the most
prominent, talented, or aggressive person in a group. "Zulu"-tribe;
a member of the Negroid people of eastern South Africa; a Social
Aid and Pleasure Club in New Orleans; an adjective to describe the
language, customs, etc., of the Zulu people. "Alpha Zulu" is a
venture into African American storytelling; it is a blurring of
secular and sacred, the tavern and the church, the fall and the
ascension of the individual, the beautiful and the terrible, and
the humanity found in the twist of the street and the turn of the
road.
The people in the poems-the narrators and the subjects-tell the
stories. The details and images locate each poem at the crossroad
of ordinary people with extraordinary, edgy, and universal
situations, and their responses are spiritual and streetwise. The
lyricism of the line supplies a subtle blues and jazz as the
underscore for a very particular community. Narrators and personas
give perspectives of place and time, placing the poems fi rmly in
the continuum of African culture in America.
Gary Copeland Lilley is a native of Sandy Cross, North Carolina,
and the beauty of the southern edge of The Great Dismal Swamp is
what he calls his ancestral home. He is veteran of the US Navy
Submarine Force and a longtime blues denizen of Washington, DC, and
Chicago, Illinois. He is also an outsider artist and currently
lives in Swannanoa, North Carolina.
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