Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities Contributor(s): Ali, Kazim (Author) |
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ISBN: 081956916X ISBN-13: 9780819569165 Publisher: Wesleyan University Press OUR PRICE: $22.50 Product Type: Hardcover Published: September 2009 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Poetry | American - General |
Dewey: 811.6 |
LCCN: 2009013375 |
Series: Wesleyan Poetry |
Physical Information: 0.6" H x 6" W x 9" (0.75 lbs) 112 pages |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: Eloquent intercultural coming-of-age story This groundbreaking, transgenre work--part detective story, part literary memoir, part imagined past--is intensely autobiographical and confessional. Proceeding sentence by sentence, city by city, and backwards in time, poet and essayist Kazim Ali details the struggle of coming of age between cultures, overcoming personal and family strictures to talk about private affairs and secrets long held. The text is comprised of sentences that alternate in time, ranging from discursive essay to memoir to prose poetry. Art, history, politics, geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence plays in each, are its interwoven themes. Bright Felon is literally "autobiography" because the text itself becomes a form of writing the life, revealing secrets, and then, amid the shards and fragments of experience, dealing with the aftermath of such revelations. Bright Felon offers a new and active form of autobiography alongside such texts as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and Etel Adnan's In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. A reader's companion is available at http: //brightfelonreader.site.wesleyan.edu/ |