Conjuring numerous voices and characters across oceans and
centuries, Faster Than Light explores widely disparate experiences
through the lens of traditional poetic forms. This volume contains
a selection of Marilyn Nelson's new and uncollected poems as well
as work from each of her lyric histories of eighteenth-,
nineteenth-, and twentieth-century African American individuals and
communities.
Poems include the stories of historical figures like Emmett
Till, the fourteen-year-old boy lynched in 1955, and the
inhabitants of Seneca Village, an African American community razed
in 1857 for the creation of Central Park. "Bivouac in a Storm"
tells the story of a group of young soldiers, later known as the
Tuskegee Airmen, as they trained near Biloxi, Mississippi,
"marching in summer heat / thick as blackstrap molasses, under
trees / haunted by whippings." Later pieces range from the poet's
travels in Africa, Europe, and Polynesia, to poems written in
collaboration with Father Jacques de Foiard Brown, a former
Benedictine monk and the subject of Nelson's playful fictional
fantasy sequence, "Adventure-Monk " Both personal and historical,
these poems remain grounded in everyday details but reach toward
spiritual and moral truths.
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