Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Description

Yusef Komunyakaa has become one of America's most compelling poets. Pleasure Dome gathers over twenty-five years of work, including early uncollected poems and a rich selection of new poems. Best known for Neon Vernacular, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994, and for Dien Cai Dau, a collection of poems chronicling his experiences as a journalist in Vietnam, Yusef Komunyakaa has become one of America's most compelling poets. Pleasure Dome gathers the poems in these two distinguished books and five others--over two and a half decades of Komunyakaa's work. In addition, Pleasure Dome includes 25 early, uncollected poems and a rich selection of 18 new poems. Cover Pleasure Dome Title Copyright Dedication Contents New Poems Providence Water Jasmine The Whispering Gallery Tuesday Night at the Savoy Ballroom Doppelgängers Somewhere Never Land Pepper South Carolina Morning Rendezvous Once the Dream Begins Ogoni Keeper of the Vigil Nightbird Tenebrae Double Limbo NJ Transit Early Uncollected Mississippi John Hurt Langston Hughes Blue Tonality De Síntoma Profundo Lover Reminiscence Waiting for a Tree Through a Window The Lamp Carrier The Life & Times of Billy Boy A House of Snow Recital of Water Over Stones The Dog’s Theology They Say in Yellow Jacket When Men Can’t Trust Hands with Wood Birthday Song Legacy Eye Witness Unnatural Deaths A Different Story One-Breath Song Frontal Lobe Postscript Sagittarius Approaching Thirty-Five Cubism Insinuations Loneliness Dedications & Other Darkhorses Returning the Borrowed Road Chair Gallows Allegorical Seduction Under House Arrest Translating Footsteps Urban Renewal Magpies The Tongue Is Ten Speeds (E)Motion Observatory Lost in the Bonewheel Factory Looking a Mad Dog Dead in the Eyes Floor Plans Tour Guide Sitting in a Rocking Chair, Going Blind Pushing in All the Buttons Confessing My Ignorance 1938 S & M Stepfather: A Girl’s Song Stepmother: A Boy’s Song No Love in This House High on Sadness Sunbather Apprenticeship Light on the Subject Punchdrunk Vigilante Nothing to Do with Janice Drake Reconstructing a Crime Two Beg Song Death Threat Note Child Stealer A Poet Whose Photo Never Grows Old Poetics Imagination Ghost Chant, et alii Passions The Dog Act For You, Sweetheart, I’ll Sell Plutonium Reactors Feet Nailed to the Floor The Nazi Doll Breaking Camp Corrigenda Copacetic False Leads Soliloquy: Man Talking to a Mirror The Way the Cards Fall Reflections Annabelle Faith Healer More Girl Than Boy April Fools’ Day Untitled Blues Jumping Bad Blues Initials on Aspens Family Tree Instructions for Building Straw Huts An Exchange Student Awaits the Arrival of an African Princess Back Then Blasphemy Lost Wax Safe Subjects Black String of Days Eleemosynary Speaking of Luck Villon/Leadbelly Borinken Blues Let’s Say Elegy for Thelonious Copacetic Mingus Letter to Bob Kaufman Woman, I Got the Blues Street Cool Clara Newport Beach, 1979 Gloria’s Clues Charmed Captain Diable’s Receptionist The Cage Walker Addendum Epilogue to the Opera of Dead on Arrival By Proxy 1931 The Leper’s Bell Blues Chant Hoodoo Revival Toys in a Field Nothing Big Ambush Water Buffalo Monsoon Season Le Xuan, Beautiful Spring Toys in a Field Please Returning (1975) I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head Unnatural State of the Unicorn Lightshow Sorrow Touch-up Man How I See Things Insufficient Blue The Thorn Merchant The Thorn Merchant’s Right-Hand Man After the Heart’s Interrogation Happy-Go-Lucky’s Wolf Skull Dream Mask The Heart’s Graveyard Shift Hard Up Boy Wearing a Dead Man’s Clothes Gift Horse The Music That Hurts When in Rome—Apologia The Thorn Merchant’s Wife The Thorn Merchant’s Mistress Somewhere Else After Summer Fell Apart Uncertainty in Blue The Brain to the Heart Audacity of the Lower Gods The Falling-Down Song Syzygy The Thorn Merchant’s Son I Apologize 1984 Dreambook Bestiary Two Cranial Murals Jonestown: More Eyes for Jadwiga’s Dream Landscape for the Disappeared Articulation & Class In the Labor Camp of Good Intentions Good Joe Making Out with the Dream-Shredding Machine In the Background of Silence Cinderella at Big Sur Born Pretty in a Poor Country Olympia “Everybody’s Reading Li Po” Silkscreened on a Purple T-Shirt For the Walking Dead Too Pretty for Serious Business Child’s Play Raw Data for an Unfinished Questionnaire The Beast & Burden: Seven Improvisations Dien Cai Dau Camouflaging the Chimera Tunnels Somewhere Near Phu Bai Starlight Scope Myopia Red Pagoda A Greenness Taller Than Gods The Dead at Quang Tri Hanoi Hannah Roll Call Fragging “You and I Are Disappearing” 2527th Birthday of the Buddha Re-creating the Scene Night Muse & Mortar Round One More Loss to Count Sappers Nude Pictures We Never Know A Break from the Bush Seeing in the Dark Tu Do Street Communiqué The Edge Donut Dollies Prisoners Jungle Surrender Eyeball Television The One-legged Stool Short-timer’s Calendar Thanks To Have Danced with Death Report from the Skull’s Diorama Combat Pay for Jody Sunset Threnody After the Fall Saigon Bar Girls, 1975 Boat People Bui Doi, Dust of Life Missing in Action Losses Between Days Facing It February in Sydney Under the Harbour Bridge The Man Who Carries the Desert Around Inside Himself: For Wally Rocks Push The Plea When Loneliness Is a Man A Quality of Light Gerry’s Jazz Boxing Day Protection of Moveable Cultural Heritage A Delicate Conspiracy The Cops Call Him Charlie Frank’s Poem Blue Light Lounge Sutra for the Performance Poets at Harold Park Hotel February in Sydney Magic City Venus’s-flytraps The Whistle Playthings Yellow Dog Café Happiness Seasons Between Yes & No Glory April’s Anarchy The Millpond Immolatus Banking Potatoes The Smokehouse The Steel Plate Sunday Afternoons Looking for Choctaw Fleshing-out the Season Blackberries Yellowjackets Gristmill History Lessons Temples of Smoke Boys in Dresses Nude Tango Touch Sugar Albino Halloween, the Late Fifties Mismatched Shoes My Father’s Love Letters The Cooling Board Omen Believing in Iron Salomé Between Angels & Monsters Poetics of Paperwood Slam, Dunk, & Hook Sex, Magnolias, & Speed Knights of the White Camellia & Deacons of Defense Nocturne Butterfly-toed Shoes Neon Vernacular Fog Galleon At the Screen Door Moonshine Salt Changes; or, Reveries at a Window Overlooking a Country Road, with Two Women Talking Blues in the Kitchen Work Praising Dark Places A Good Memory Birds on a Powerline Fever Little Man Around the House Songs for My Father Thieves of Paradise Memory Cave Out There There Be Dragons The Song Thief Wet Nurse Ode to a Drum Eclogue at Daybreak Genealogy Kosmos Confluence Palimpsest Mumble Peg Ia Drang Valley Cenotaph The Trapper’s Bride Eclogue at Twilight The Tally Heroes of Waterloo Wokanmagulli Waratah New Gold Mountain White Lady Meditations on a Dingo Report from the Lucky Country In the Mirror The Piccolo John Says Corners of Night Messages Visitation Bennelong’s Blues Quatrains for Ishi The Glass Ark Nude Interrogation The Poplars Surgery Phantasmagoria A Summer Night in Hanoi A Reed Boat Buried Light The Hanoi Market Shrines Frontispiece Breasts The Deck Ghost Video Phantom Limbs Dream Animal Testimony Blessing the Animals Rhythm Method The Parrot Asylum The Thorn Merchant’s Daughter The Monkey House Dolphy’s Aviary Crack No-Good Blues Sandhog The Wall A Story What Counts Woebegone Strands Anodyne Index of Titles and First Lines