Description: A cross-genre poetry collection that troubles the idea of poetic voice while considering history, biology, the shamanistic, and the shapes of racial memory.
In the final section of Negro Mountain, C. S. Giscombe writes, "Negro Mountain--the summit of which is the highest point in Pennsylvania--is a default, a way among others to think about the Commonwealth." Named for an "incident" in which a Black man was killed while fighting on the side of white enslavers against Indigenous peoples in the eighteenth century, this mountain has a shadow presence throughout this collection; it appears, often indirectly, in accounts of visions, reimaginings of geography, testimonies about the "natural" world, and speculations and observations about race, sexuality, and monstrosity. These poems address location, but Giscombe--who worked for ten years in central Pennsylvania--understands location to be a practice, the continual "action of situating." The book weaves through the ranges of thinking that poetic voice itself might trouble. Addressing a gallery of figures, Giscombe probes their impurities and ambivalences as a way of examining what languages "count" or "don't count" as poetry. Here, he finds that the idea of poetry is visionary, but also investigatory and exploratory.Brief description: C. S. Giscombe is the author or coauthor of fourteen books, including Giscome Road, winner of the Carl Sandburg Prize; Prairie Style, winner of an American Book Award; Border Towns; Ohio Railroads; and Train Music, in collaboration with the book artist Judith Margolis. He is the recipient of the 2010 Stephen Henderson Award given by the African-American Literature and Culture Society. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, the Canadian Embassy to the United States, and others. He is professor and Robert Hass Chair in English at the University of California, Berkeley.
Review Quotes: "[Giscombe's] journey is captivating, sardonic, entertainingly digressive, and luminous with thought, whether stopping to ponder the Black figure in Rousseau's painting Jaguar Attacking a Negro or spinning dream tales where he becomes a white man or 'a woman in a prison camp.' . . . The lithe veracity of his writing, it turns out, is a testament to freedom--not the 'white freedom' that he imagines in a dream, but the harder-earned cognitive liberty that comes from confronting the mystery of the journey: 'Travel's enigmatic and we don't have to go to Negro Mountain to see that.'"-- "LitHub"