This volume provides a unique synthesis of the relevant literature from academic studies in the fields of political science, marketing, advertising, speech communication, telecommunication, and public relations combined with the practical wisdom of professional consultants. Offering the reader both the theory and practical applications associated with negative political advertising, this is the first book devoted exclusively to the various forms of negative campaigning in the United States. After developing a typology of negative political spots for greater clarity in explaining and evaluating them, the book addresses effectiveness questions such as: What works? When? Why? and How?

This volume provides a unique synthesis of the relevant literature from academic studies in the fields of political science, marketing, advertising, speech communication, telecommunication, and public relations combined with the practical wisdom of professional consultants. Offering the reader both the theory and practical applications associated with negative political advertising, this is the first book devoted exclusively to the various forms of negative campaigning in the United States. After developing a typology of negative political spots for greater clarity in explaining and evaluating them, the book addresses effectiveness questions such as: What works? When? Why? and How?

"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.

New poetry from award-winning poety Gary Copeland Lilley.