Selected Poems of Langston Hughes Review

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(More customer reviews)I had read several Hughes poems before buying this book, but I will admit that I had no grasp on the extent of his talent. These vivid poems were chosen by Hughes personally before his death in 1967.
They do so well to paint a picture of the time he lived -- of the blues, of love, of passion, of choices. He writes about faith and protest in a way that will move you.
I have read all of the poems exactly as they are placed in the book several times. I think I keep going back to them because this is poetry free of pretense -- it is grounded in reality and in sorrow.
Independent of age, of your ethnicity, and of your literary grasp, you will enjoy these poems. Simple and superb -- read them out loud.

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With the publication of his first book of poems, The Weary Blues, in 1926, Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in black writing in America. The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who "rushed the boots of Washington"; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in "the raffle of night." They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture. They spanned the range from the lyric to the polemic, ringing out "wonder and pain and terror-- and the marrow of the bone of life."The poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death in 1967 and represent work from his entire career, including "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "The Weary Blues," "Still Here," "Song for a Dark Girl," "Montage of a Dream Deferred," and "Refugee in America." It gives us a poet of extraordinary range, directness, and stylistic virtuosity.

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The Mercy Seat Review

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(More customer reviews)This is not an attempt at a review, it is comment. Being a native Oklahoman and a kind of shirt-tail historian, I have nibbled forever at the edges of that formative time in the history of Oklahoma and the making of its people, delighting in finding tidbits and hints of how it really was when my world was in the making. Rilla Askew took my hand and led me there. Gave me time to breathe the air and smell the cooking. Let me feel the rough, peeling bark of a windowless cabin's walls, put my hand on the hurt of a beautiful child in the process of being destroyed by the ambitions and defeats of the adults who make up her world.I'm waiting for my memory of it to cool so I can read it again. Visit Mattie, Fate, John. Maybe lay a compassionate hand on their shoulder.Reviews, comparisons, and synopses fail the book. It is not just a good read. It is an experience.

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As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text (Modern Library) Review

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(More customer reviews)To quote the briefest chapter, the one that would surely catch your eye if you picked it off a shelf and skimmed through it: "My mother is a fish."
As with his stunning _The_Sound_and_the_Fury_ and _Absalom_Absalom_, this book makes use of the author's masterful use of stream-of-conscious writing to render an entire reality with internal monologues. The story unfolds as you construct it from the observations and responses of the characters. Though briefer and less challenging than these other two books, it's as absorbing a read as they have been for decades. When you reach the end, you can imagine that you'll pick up the book again someday, sure there's more to explore.
The structure is simple once you get the hang of it. Each chapter is the name of a particular character in the story of the family of Addie Bundren, dead in the first few pages, and being transported by her clan to the land of her birth for burial-by wagon, in the heat and dust, over rivers, for weeks, before the vacuum seal... There is no "Once upon a time." Instead, whatever that character is thinking at the instant the chapter begins is what you're reading. Soon, you know who everyone is and what she thinks of everyone else. The effect of this structure is that you can inhabit the narrative as each of the players, can see how events are interpreted differently. It's also like a mystery-someone will have troubled thoughts about something you can't quite distinguish; then, twenty pages later, you figure out what they've been talking about and you flip backward in a frenzy to see how the early references to the issue flesh out the story. This is a terribly rewarding way of reading.
This is a great first Faulkner for everyone. You develop the ability to read his complex novels by virtue of the simplicity of the story and the mostly brief chapters, each from a fresh point of view. You learn to read on if you don't get something. (Important skill: Faulkner is one of my absolute favorite authors since high school, and one of my favorite things is that you have to trust the story to tell you what you need to know in time. Not only do you get the reward of context for the occasional non sequitur, but you have the thrill of anticipation when something weird happens. This book is a great example of how, unlike Hemingway, where you have to read a basically boring story over and over to understand all the juicy stuff, Faulkner gives you nibbles of fantastic plot to hold you through the ultimate analysis.

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