Overview

Moonflower by Phillip Shabazz is a collection of poems that capture the experience of living through prolonged barriers, disparities, and challenging times. Written in a meditative, identity-based style, the poems resemble an urban tapestry, touching on the cost of progress and the fading spirit of community in the early twenty-first century. Moonflower draws upon a symbol between the journey of the speaker and the contemporary American experience, reflecting on the external and internal conflict between nihilism, hope, and redemption. The collection emphasizes the resistance and steady blossoming of the moonflower, despite the struggle, if only to live for one beautiful night. There pervades a sense of possibility in the rise of determined voices who have come of age in the quest for liberty, democracy, and happiness. The poems pay homage to other artists including Langston Hughes, June Jordan, and Georgia O'Keefe.

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9781594981708

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Reviews

It's a fitting title, Moonflower-the flower is a species of night blooming morning glory that stays open all night, longer if the day is overcast, and is both fragrant and toxic to humans. Many of Shabazz's poems are likewise set at night and unleash abundance and sorrow in equal measure. There is a Whitmanian generosity to the voice, an embrace of the associative power of song-of song itself-to encompass any kind or volume of expression. ""I sing all the time,"" he says and then adds, ""I bury sons all the time."" The poems issue from the heart of twentieth and twenty-first century Black culture, and part of the book's value is as time capsule for the richness of that culture. At the center are poems that address the poet's search for connection with his alcoholic father, which seems a doomed but still hopeful quest: ""Maybe we / Could be more than a huff out of the glass hole / Be the home talk only we can give each other."" Moonflower is a deeply affecting, expansive work of art. Jeffrey Skinner, author of Chance Divine and Glaciology These are poems to be read aloud, to be felt in the mouth, coming forth on the tongue, and through strong teeth. They are totally made of sound. Phillip Shabazz is a master of image collision and word surprise. The journey itself, poem to poem, is quiet to loud, push to pull, shove and halt, fly and fall. Along the way, we meet his muses by the river: the poet's homeboy Ali, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Georgia O'Keefe, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, Colin Kaepernik, June Jordan, Tamir Rice, George Floyd, and the poet's long-departed father who looms just around the corner. Throughout, blooming moonflowers open on vines that wrap and twine the seasons and stories, scented white flags that never surrender to the night. Georgann Eubanks, author of Rural Astronomy Compelling and remarkably honest, Moonflower investigates both the softer and sharper edges of our unique emotional landscapes in a series of exciting, accessible poems that explore equally the strengths and frailties of the human condition in its varied aspects-personal identity, grief, relationships, family, and slowly mending hearts. Weaving together universal, openhearted narratives into a poignant collection, Moonflower is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging, reminding us of the beautiful complexities of being human. John Sibley Williams, author of As One Fire Consumes Another Phillip Shabazz's new volume of poetry, Moonflower, is in every way intoxicating and mysterious as the night-blooming flower from which it borrows its title-and, indeed, the exotic bloom is a luminous beating trope throughout these prayerful, sensual narratives where ""Language is a saint suffering thorns,"" and ""the future- / a burning hole in the heart of an angel in the rain."" Moonflower is a marvel-requiem and resurrection: with magelike finesse, Shabazz summons the dead and electrifies the living. Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14) and author of The 13th Sunday after Pentecost

Author Information

Phillip Shabazz serves as a poet-in-the schools of North Carolina and works as a teaching artist. He is the author of three poetry collections and When the Grass Was Blue, a novel in verse. His poems have been published in journals including the Florida Review, New Critique, K'in, Broadkill Review, Mason Street Journal, and Thimble.

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