The green tuxedo
By: Janet Holmes.
Series: The Ernest Sandeen prize in poetry ;; 1999
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Notre Dame, Ind
Language: eng
Number of pages: 60
Description: Janet Holmes's second book of poems explores and interrogates the quotidian life of the late twentieth century for what exists behind its often seductive appearance. In these poems we see beneath acceptable, sleek surfaces into the turbulence they often conceal, as the splendid green tuxedo of the title may disguise a heart that harbors racism, fear, and violence.

Holmes exhorts us to look beyond the face value of what presents itself, to resist literal interpretations, and to plumb the many depths afforded by each encounter with the world outside ourselves. In the second half of The Green Tuxedo, Holmes draws on recently discovered diaries kept by her journalist father nearly fifty years before her birth.