Land's End

I recently went to a talk by Professor Marcellus Blount on Post-Aids African-American Literature. His current research is on black masculinity as well as queer identity, a very arresting niche of research since the two can be conflicting. He passed out some poems and I've been trying to find the author of this one with no luck. It's such a beautiful, frozen pond of a poem. I'm going to transcribe it here, and if you happen to know/find the author, PLEASE let me know!!

LAND'S END

Provincetown

Zero ground, fickle sandbar
where graves and gravity conspire,

Beer bottle amber and liquor green
surrender their killing shards.

Like ashes, dust, even glass
turns back into what it was.

Skeletal driftwood and seaweed hair
beg for a body. Any body.

Yet all you see is surf out there,
simply more and more of nothing.

If you must leave us, now or later,
the sea will bring you back.


I also asked him to recommend some exciting, high-school appropriate, teachable, contemporary African-American literature, and he suggested the following that I'm excited to check out:

1. Brothers and Keepers

 
according to Amazon:

A haunting portrait of lives arriving at different destinies, Brothers and Keepers is John Edgar Wideman’s seminal memoir about two brothers — one an award-winning novelist, the other a fugitive wanted for robbery and murder. Wideman recalls the capture of his younger brother Robby, details the subsequent trials that resulted in a sentence of life in prison, and provides vivid views of the American prison system.

2. The Torturer's Wife

From Publisher Weekly:

Glave's second collection is a disquieting, graphic, semiexperimental compendium examining violence and ignorance in and out of wartime. After opening with a contemporary relationship drama, Glave makes the jarring transition to armed conflicts, invasion and genocide. What most unifies these works is what's left unsaid—secrets are a constant, and there are virtually no names. Glave's style, full of interruptions, ellipses, unconventional text treatments and poemlike breaks, sends each story whirling thickly toward its end: in the title story, a woman called She is haunted by grotesque nightmares of dismembered body parts raining on her house and garden, after discovering her high-ranking husband's wartime atrocities. In the allegorical Milk/Sea; Sentience, the dreams of a sleeping village of women heal war's wounds. Between takes a step back to focus on a couple, telling the story of two racist gay men in an interracial relationship; cleverly, Glave refers to both as one of them. Laced with grisly details, this daring but uneven collection may not find a wide audience, but makes an intriguing experiment in post-postmodern war fiction.

3. Whose Song?

 From the Publisher:

Whose Song? And Other Stories is the literary debut of a talented young writer, Thomas Glave. His writing is marked by an energy, an ambition, and a fearlessness that are all too rare.
Threads of African American and gay experience, as well as Caribbean and Caribbean-American culture and history connect these stories, set in the Bronx and other parts of New York City, Boston, the American South, and the Caribbean. "Commitment" takes place on the day before a wedding in the rural South. Two young black men are forced to end their clandestine relationship as the father of one of them threatens to kill them both. In "Their Story," two elderly men, one from Jamaica and the other from the South, lose their wives and find comfort with each other. "—And Love Them?" is the one-sided dialogue of a white woman, an office worker who tries to communicate her conflicted feelings toward "them," that is, the black people she encounters at her job, on the streets of New York, and in her imagination. And "The Pit" is a haunting, harrowing tale about a young Caribbean boy who visits the site of an enormous killing field and returns to his terrorized village endowed with prophetic powers.
Thomas Glave is a deft stylist, and each of the nine stories in this collection reveals yet another of his successful technical experiments.