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"Poetry. African & African American Studies. Asian & Asian American Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Performance Studies. ""Ronaldo V. Wilson explodes all over the mouth of whiteness in LUCY 72 like Césaire stroking the Latin root 'niger, ' courting its deranged figuration. With satire, grace, deep lyric reflection--all inside of the persistent strangulation of a rigorous couplet--the radiant poems in LUCY 72 are a working out and a working on this thing we call 'race.' In these poems, whiteness is abstracted away from color and made manifest in gesture, a relaxed state, a non-awareness, and certain preferences and unperceived privileges. Wilson strips down the symbolic figure, Lucy, exposing her blind and deaf obsession with her own whiteness--'One of my favorite words is alabaster'--and cranks our eyes toward these brutal cultural tropes: there is 'a black' and then there is the effortless abstraction of whiteness; blackness is opaque; whiteness is transparent; blackness, hard object, whiteness, effervescence. LUCY 72 is a haunting, gorgeously written, and absolutely necessary book for our times. When Lucy speaks, we should all listen closely.""--Dawn Lundy Martin ""LUCY 72 is an intricate, multi-faceted, rarely used underhand serve executed with the power and skill of a masterful languager. Wilson undertakes and asserts a new kind of self-reflexive portraiture in which all manner of 'body' is addressed. The body historical, the racial body, the flesh body, all gather in an open-air refusal to conform, to resign. Here agency is fiercely nuanced--petaled and thorned...the gloves have come off. Raise your racquet. Loose your head and heart. These poems are a guidebook of rosary beads for crossing the street, returning an out wide serve, and for being transcendently human.""--giovanni singleton"

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9780999004944

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Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD, is the author of LUCY 72, Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, POEMS OF THE BLACK OBJECT, and FARTHER TRAVELER: POETRY, PROSE, OTHER. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Ford Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, the National Research Council, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Center for Art and Thought, and Yaddo, Wilson is a mixed media artist, dancer and performer. RVW has performed in multiple venues--as LUCY--at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Lousiana State University's Digital Media Center Theater, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Reed College, CalArts, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Tube Factory artspace, University of Pittsburgh's Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and Southern Exposure Gallery. Wilson is Associate Professor Creative Writing and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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