Devotions (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780226764351)

In the hands of Bruce Smith, devotions are momentary stops to listen to the motor of history. They are meditations and provocations. They are messages received from the chatter of the street and from transmissions as distant as Memphis and al-Mansur. Bulletins and interruptions come from brutal elsewheres and from the interior where music puts electrodes on the body to take an EKG. These poems visit high schools, laundromats, motels, films, and dreams in order to measure the American hunger and thirst. They are interested in the things we profess to hold most dear as well as what's unspoken and unbidden. While we're driving, while riding a bus, while receiving a call, while passing through an X-ray machine, the personal is intersected-sometimes violently, sometimes tenderly-with the hum and buzz of the culture. The culture, whether New York or Tuscaloosa, Seattle or Philadelphia, past or present, carries the burden of race and "someone's idea of beauty." The poems fluctuate between the two poles of "lullaby and homicide" before taking a vow to remain on earth, to look right and left, to wait and to witness.

Author: Bruce Smith
ISBN-10: 0226764354
ISBN-13: 9780226764351
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 04/15/2011
Pages: 104
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.38lbs
Size: 8.96h x 6.10w x 0.28d
Award: National Book Awards - Finalist
Award: National Book Critics Circle Award - Finalist
Award: L.A. Times Book Prize - Finalist

Review Citation(s):
Booklist 03/15/2011 pg. 16
Publishers Weekly 03/21/2011
New York Times Book Review 08/07/2011 pg. 16
New York Times Book Review 08/14/2011 pg. 26
Publishers Weekly Best Books 11/07/2011 pg. 26
LJ Best Books of Year 12/01/2011 pg. 63