Congotronic

The second collection from Canadian poet and filmmaker Shane Book. At once original, strange, funny, and unnerving, Shane Book’s Congotronic takes the reader into unstable territory, where multiple layers of voice, diction, and music collide. Some of these poems have the sparse directness of a kind of bleak prayer; others mingle the earthbound rhythms of hip-hop with the will-to-transcendence of high Romanticism. Harnessing techniques of the cinematic and audio arts, Book’s poems splice, sample, collage, and jump-cut language from an array of sources, including slave narratives, Western philosophy, hip hop lyrics, and the diaries of plantation owners. The book’s anchoring series contains an apocryphal narrative grounded in the journey of the Middle Passage and an older mythic history from the West African epic of Sundiata. Here is a world poet of the Sonic Global South sheathed in a Northern Hemispheric glow suit, high “on Coltrane, on Zeus” but also on the old and new schools of Descartes, M.I.A., Cecil Taylor, Gilbert Ryle, Freud, and Jay-Z, among others — or as one poem puts it, the "aural truths."

The highly anticipated annual anthology of the best Canadian and international poetry. Each year, the best books of poetry published in English internationally and in Canada are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001 this annual prize has acted as a tremendous spur to interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English. And each year The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards, and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections. In choosing the 2015 shortlist, prize jurors Tim Bowling, Fanny Howe, and Piotr Sommer will consider hundreds of collections published in 2014. The jury members will also write the citations that introduce the seven poets’ nominated works. Royalties generated from The 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology will be donated to UNESCO’s World Poetry Day, which was created to support linguistic diversity through poetic expression and to offer endangered languages the opportunity to be heard in their communities. Shortlist to be announced: April 7, 2015 Readings: June 3, 2015 Prizes awarded: June 4, 2015

At once original, strange, funny, and unnerving, Shane Book’s Congotronic takes the reader into unstable territory, where multiple layers of voice, diction, and music collide. Some of these poems have the sparse directness of a kind of bleak prayer; others mingle the earthbound rhythms of hip-hop with the will-to-transcendence of high Romanticism. Harnessing techniques of the cinematic and audio arts, Book’s poems splice, sample, collage, and jump-cut language from an array of sources, including slave narratives, Western philosophy, hip hop lyrics, and the diaries of plantation owners. In fusing disparate texts, each poem in this collection attempts to create a community in language. Thus, at its core, the project is utopic—or more precisely, to borrow from Duke Ellington—the project is “blutopic.” The book’s anchoring series contains an apocryphal narrative grounded in the journey of the Middle Passage and an older mythic history from the West African epic of Sundiata. Here elements of Afrofuturism coagulate with an R&B grin as social forces challenge a sense of personhood, prompting free-jazz inflected conversations between the pieces of a shattered, polyvocal self. Here is a world poet of the Sonic Global South sheathed in a Northern Hemispheric glow suit, high “on Coltrane, on Zeus” but also on the old and new schools of Descartes, M.I.A., Cecil Taylor, Gilbert Ryle, Freud, and Jay Z, among others—or as one poem puts it, the “aural truths.”

The second collection from Canadian poet and filmmaker Shane Book. At once original, strange, funny, and unnerving, Shane Book's Congotronic takes the reader into unstable territory, where multiple layers of voice, diction, and music collide. Some of these poems have the sparse directness of a kind of bleak prayer; others mingle the earthbound rhythms of hip-hop with the will-to-transcendence of high Romanticism. Harnessing techniques of the cinematic and audio arts, Book's poems splice, sample, collage, and jump-cut language from an array of sources, including slave narratives, Western philosophy, hip hop lyrics, and the diaries of plantation owners. The book's anchoring series contains an apocryphal narrative grounded in the journey of the Middle Passage and an older mythic history from the West African epic of Sundiata. Here is a world poet of the Sonic Global South sheathed in a Northern Hemispheric glow suit, high "on Coltrane, on Zeus" but also on the old and new schools of Descartes, M.I.A., Cecil Taylor, Gilbert Ryle, Freud, and Jay-Z, among others -- or as one poem puts it, the "aural truths."

In 2001, Jace Clayton was an amateur DJ who recorded a three-turntable, sixty-minute mix called Gold Teeth Thiefand put it online to share with his friends. Within months, the mix became an international calling card, whisking Clayton away to a sprawling, multitiered nightclub in Zagreb, a tiny gallery in Osaka, a former brothel in São Paolo, and the atrium of MoMA. And just as the music world made its fitful, uncertain transition from analog to digital, Clayton found himself on the front lines of an education in the creative upheavals of art production in the twenty-first-century globalized world. Uproot is a guided tour of this newly opened cultural space, mapped with both his own experiences and his relationships with other industry game-changers such as M.I.A. and Pirate Bay. With humor, insight, and expertise, Clayton illuminates the connections between a Congolese hotel band and the indie rock scene, Mexican surfers and Israeli techno, Japanese record collectors and hidden rain-forest treasure, and offers an unparalleled understanding of music in a digital age. Uproot takes readers behind the turntable decks to tell a story that only a DJ--and writer--of this caliber can tell.