"Harris is a poet who pushes, lures, cajoles us into the uncharted, the uneasy, the unsettled. Wildly, thrillingly experimental, yet Amnesiac navigates not only the ether and the subterranean, but the ground where we all live."—Nick Flynn
Description
Poet, musician, scholar, and singer, Duriel E. Harris has written an amazing book. As Sterling Plumpp tells us, her work “is a twenty-first century literary text emerging out of the prism of race, gender, and social class. It is eloquently postmodern funk and intimately original.” She does this while telling us in poetry of extraordinarily high order an intimate, personal history, probing with her heart and intelligence into matters she has half passed over or forgotten. Perhaps Amnesiac is a term for tragic hero. In this case the tragic hero is a woman, a poet, and a singer.
About the Author
Duriel E. Harris is the author of the poetry collection Drag, a multivocal symphony in five movements. An acclaimed poet, performance/sound artist and scholar, her work has been featured and published internationally. Harris holds degrees from Yale University and the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University, and a PhD from the University of Illinois. A co-founder of the Black Took Collective and member of Douglas Ewart and Inventions free jazz ensemble, she is an assistant professor of english and teaches creative writing and poetics at Illinois State University.
August 2010