Winner of the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize
Missing You, Metropolis
Poems
- “Jackson integrates the comic-book world of superheroes like Spider-Man and Batman into his world as a black adolescent in Kansas. . . . The finale is gentle, almost anticlimactic, as he recalls how his superheroes let him ‘inhabit a world a page removed from our own,’ hinting at the grace of (temporary) escapism.”—San Francisco Chronicle
The exploits you find in my comics
are no more probable
than snow in Sunnyvale.
I’m not as black as you dream.
—from “Luke Cage Tells It Like It Is
With humor and the serious collector’s delight, Gary Jackson imagines the comic-book worlds of Superman, Batman, and the X-Men alongside the veritable worlds of Kansas, racial isolation, and the gravesides of a sister and a friend.
are no more probable
than snow in Sunnyvale.
I’m not as black as you dream.
—from “Luke Cage Tells It Like It Is
With humor and the serious collector’s delight, Gary Jackson imagines the comic-book worlds of Superman, Batman, and the X-Men alongside the veritable worlds of Kansas, racial isolation, and the gravesides of a sister and a friend.
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About the Author
Praise
- “Jackson masters a parallel universe in verse.”—The Brooklyn Rail
- “Echoing the framed narratives from which he drew inspiration, Jackson presents graphically-intense poems that never waver in the face of desperate situations and bad people. Everything is exposed in full color and exacting, sometimes raw, language, but with astounding empathy, showing how human the villains who inhabit those pages can be.”—ForeWord Reviews
- “For all its disarming charm and surface breeziness, as well as the deliberate use of couplets and quatrains to mimic the formal borders that contain a comic’s narrative, this book sounds profound depths of rage, lust, sorrow, and estrangement. . . . Missing You, Metropolis heralds a new voice unafraid to embrace pop culture, and to discover in it a world at once paradoxical, desired, and cruel.”—Rain Taxi Review of Books
- “Missing You, Metropolis is exceptional.”—Porter Gulch Review
Acknowledgements
This book is made possible, in part, through the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a first-book award dedicated to the discovery of exceptional manuscripts by African American poets, and by the generosity of Graywolf Press donors like you.
