No Dictionary of a Living Tongue [Paperback]

No Dictionary of a Living Tongue is formidable in its explorations of art, citizenship, and life as a body amid the social, political, and electronic networks that define us, hold us together, bind us. The poems here take many formsprose, lyric, epigram, narrative, dialogue fragment, song, musical score, fairy tale, and dictionary entry. An elegant use of sound couples with a keen and roving intelligence and a fierce commitment to social justice to create a unique and powerful collection of poems.Poet, performer, and sound artist, DURIEL E. HARRIS is author of Drag and Amnesiac and coauthor of the poetry video Speleology. Current undertakings include Blood Labyrinth and the solo performance project Thingification. Harris is an associate professor of English in the graduate creative writing program at Illinois State University.Insightful, contemplative, and often emotionally wrenching, Harriss poems reject the idea of blackness as a monolith and reflect its multifariousness.Publishers Weekly (starred review)Here is black brilliance doing what it do, relying on nothing but itself to articulate its genius; here is the black experiment of Harris where the poet is the lab, the genius, the rat, the substance, and the boom filling the room at once.Danez Smith