Title: Silencer /
Authors: Wicker, Marcus,
Year: 2017
Subjects: African Americans Poetry.; African American young men Poetry.; African American men Poetry.; POETRY American African American.; POETRY Inspirational & Religious.; POETRY American General.; HISTORY Social History.; SOCIAL SCIENCE Black Studies (Global)
Abstract: "Welcome to Marcus Wicker's Midwest, where the muzzle is always on and where silence and daily microaggressions can chafe away at the faith of a young man grieved by images of gun violence and police brutality in twenty-first-century America. Precisely contradictory, bittersweet, witty, and heartbreaking, Silencer is where the political and the personal collide. Driven by the sounds of hip-hop and reimagined forms and structures, Wicker's explosive second bookis composed of poems at war with themselves, verses in which the poet questions his own faith in God, in hope, in the American Dream, and in himself. Pushing our ideas of traditions and expectations, these poems and queries work in concert towards creating a new dialectic"--
Contents: Silencer to the heart while jogging through a park ; Conjecture on the stained-glass image of white Christ at Ebenezer Baptist Church ; In my 31st year ; Taking aim at a Macy's changing room mirror, I blame television ; In defense of ballin' on a budget ; Watch us elocute ; Ars poetica battle rhyme for really wannabe somebodies ; Prayer on Aladdin's lamp ; Plea to my jealous heart ; Confessional booth with lines from Heartbreak "Drizzy" Drake, ending on a theme from Oddisee ; Ode to browsing the Web ; Stumped speech on the internet ; Close encounters ; Creation song in which a swift wind sucker-punches a transformer ; Silencer on the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. after sassing an officer who assumed he'd unlawfully entered his own home ; Silencer with blues & birds on a wire ; The trees ; Blue faces ; Theorizing Wesley: on the African American nonresident alien ; Film noir at Gallup Park, on the edge -- When I'm alone in my room sometimes I stare at the wall, & in the back of my mind I hear my conscience call ; The way we were made ; Incident with nature, late ; Shibboleth ; When academia tells me only a fool believes in a God that he can't see ; On being told prayer is a crutch ; Deer ode, tangled & horned ; Nocturne with revelations & militant Black Jesus ; Ars poetica -- The most dangerous game ; Animal farm -- Cul-de-sac pastoral. Ars poetica battle rhyme for sucker emcees ; Bay window lauds ; Weekend open house sext ; Tiki torch cookout vespers ; Trash night compline ; Materialist Matins ; Prayer on the subdivision -- Conjecture the dream ; Morning in the burbs.