Keynote
Thomas Sayers Ellis's brash rhythms break over issues of race and national politics—and the poetry establishment itself—with an arresting new music
Book Title
The Maverick Room
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
- “Rare, young poets have been able to take root in such soil. Few are able to flower with complex beauty. Thomas Sayers Ellis is such a poet and his debut collection, The Maverick Room, is a compendium of lyric gestures compressed into taught chords of meaning.”—Black Issues Book Review
Body
A dream. A democracy. A savage liberty.
And yet another anthem and yet another heaven
And yet another party wants you.
Wants you wants you wants you.
—from "Groovallegiance"
In this powerhouse debut, Thomas Sayers Ellis in one poem prognosticates, "Pretty soon, the Age of the Talk Show / Will slip on a peel left in the avant-gutter." The result is The Maverick Room, the testing ground of determination and serendipity, where call and response becomes Steinian echo becomes hip-hop becomes a bootlegged recording hustled out a DC go-go club. With its defiance for any one tradition or voice, Ellis's debut collection becomes a powerful argument against monotony-just when "All their stanzas look alike," just when language fails in the face of catastrophe, just when, as Ellis confesses, "the twin terrors at the center of the word dollar / have made me and my craft liar-cowards."
The Maverick Room introduces a brave, intelligent, and original new voice to American poetry.
And yet another anthem and yet another heaven
And yet another party wants you.
Wants you wants you wants you.
—from "Groovallegiance"
In this powerhouse debut, Thomas Sayers Ellis in one poem prognosticates, "Pretty soon, the Age of the Talk Show / Will slip on a peel left in the avant-gutter." The result is The Maverick Room, the testing ground of determination and serendipity, where call and response becomes Steinian echo becomes hip-hop becomes a bootlegged recording hustled out a DC go-go club. With its defiance for any one tradition or voice, Ellis's debut collection becomes a powerful argument against monotony-just when "All their stanzas look alike," just when language fails in the face of catastrophe, just when, as Ellis confesses, "the twin terrors at the center of the word dollar / have made me and my craft liar-cowards."
The Maverick Room introduces a brave, intelligent, and original new voice to American poetry.
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About the Author
Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Praise
- “This book is hip, gutsy, and penetrating; in its pages, politics share the stage with the musical and linguistic pleasures and insights good poetry should provide.”—The Harvard Review
- “[A] marvelous and accomplished volume…These are gregarious poems, always socially conscious, that never shortchange the intelligence of the reader as they dissect, intersect, embrace, and reject traditional tropes of African American literature.”—Ploughshares
- “[A] fine new collection.”—The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
- “Poems shift effortlessly into formal registers that give further resonances to Ellis’s knowing switches of code and to this marvelous maverick book….”—Publishers Weekly
