Flashback Through the Heart: The Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa seeks to address the conundrum of reading African-American poets as racial spokespeople, and to model alternative ways of addressing their work, thereby freeing them to set their own aesthetic agenda. While the larger point is that reading African-American authors as racial commentators rather than as artists results in profoundly limited interpretations of their work, this text seeks to make the point through a reading of Komunyakaa's career and his four most recent volumes of poetry. In doing so, the author seeks to convince readers that Komunyakaa has never been solely interested in dealing with the complexities of race in his work, although he does so to stunning effect in such works as Dien Cai Dau, a volume invoking the horrors of the war in Vietnam.

Still, in addressing Talking Dirty to the God (2000), it seems most fruitful for a critic to pay close attention to the cues Komunyakaa has left for readers, by virtue of the volume's organization and themes. Thus, the author posits Komunyakaa as a collector of facts, art work, ideas, and experience and compares the volume itself to a Renaissance cabinet of curiosity. Doing so requires an understanding of Komunyakaa's work, as well as a grasp of Renaissance and Italian cultural practices and historiography. Such knowledge is appropriate and necessary when working with poetry as multifaceted as Komunyakaa's.

The author's intent is not to make a special plea for Komunyakaa and his work; nor is it to diminish the effect of race and racism in his career. Rather, she seeks to suggest that reading Komunyakaa solely for his views on race reduces him to the status of lyrical sociologist "Hyphenating" Kornunyakaa leads to an only partial understanding of his work, while neglecting race in his work would also result in strange and attenuated responses to it, and would deprive the work of much of its force. Thus the author attempts to negotiate these competing responses and offer a more nuanced view of Komunyakaa's career and probable legacy to American letters.

The work concludes that Yusef Kornunyakaa is creating a body of work that is rigorous yet accessible, academic yet vernacular, and both harsh and redemptive. Kornunyakaa's balanced yet engaging work moves beyond identity politics without denying identity, and it offers its readers many opportunities for epiphany. Komunyakaa is concerned with contemporary life, but also with humanity's ongoing place in the world. He scolds as he consoles, and he forces readers to think and see the world anew. For all these reasons, and more, Yusef Komunyakaa's work will endure, and readers will "get the news," in William Carlos Williams's words, from him for the foreseeable future.

LC 2004005338

ISBN 1-57591-082-9

Printed in the U.S.A.