Understanding Etheridge Knight: With a New Preface

Collins, Michael S.

ISBN 10: 1643364391 / ISBN 13: 9781643364391

Editore: University of South Carolina Press, 2023

Riguardo questo articolo

2023. 2nd Updated ed. paperback. . . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Codice articolo V9781643364391

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Understanding Etheridge Knight: With a New Preface
• Editore: University of South Carolina Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2023
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1643364391
• ISBN 13: 9781643364391
• Rilegatura: Brossura
• Condizione: New

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

"Collins has written the book that Knight has long deserved."—American Literary Scholarship

Understanding Etheridge Knight introduces readers to a major—but understudied—American poet. Etheridge Knight (1931-1991) survived a shrapnel wound suffered during military service in Korea, as well as a drug addiction that led to an eight-year prison sentence, to publish five volumes of poetry and a small cache of powerful prose. His status in the front ranks of American poets and thinkers on poetry was acknowledged in 1984, when he won the Shelley Memorial Award, which had previously gone, as an acknowledgement of "genius and need," to E.E. Cummings, Gwendolyn Brooks, and W. S. Merwin.

In this first book-length study of Knight and his complete body of work, Michael Collins examines the poetry of a complex literary figure who, following imprisonment, transformed his life to establish himself as a charismatic voice in American poetry and an accomplished teacher at institutions such as the University of Hartford, Lincoln University, and his own Free Peoples Poetry Workshops. Beginning with a concise biography of Knight, Collins explores Knight's volumes of poetry including Poems from Prison, Black Voices from Prison, Born of a Woman, and The Essential Etheridge Knight. Unpdated to include a new preface, Understanding Etheridge Knight brings attention to a crucial era in African American and American poetry, and to the literature of the incarcerated, while reflecting on the life and work of an original voice in American poetry.

Informazioni sull?autore

Michael Collins is an associate professor of English at Texas A&M University. He has published essays and creative works in PMLA, Modern Philology, Michigan Quarterly Review, Callaloo, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, The Best American Poetry 2003, and elsewhere.