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Negro Mountain

Negro Mountain

$18.00

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$18.00

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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.
  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 the Robert Hass Chair in English at the University of California, Berkeley.
 
  Seven Dreams
The Negro Mountains
Camptown
Overlapping Apexes (for Ed Roberson) Notes on Region
Acknowledgments
Sources

“Negro Mountain traces realms of consciousness and recollection involving its namesake and presence. The weathered trail crosses thermals and paths of apexes. Buteos, maybe monsters, ever wolves and bears, dusky figures cool in the mountainside shadow of poetic accounts. Giscombe’s cadence is a ‘mountain sense’ and a methodology—a profoundly gifted range of practices surfacing love and affinity while navigating what is measureless.”
“Negro Mountain reveals the rich layers exposed between excavating time, history, and visibility. Giscombe’s rigorously brilliant and careful book unveils its complex strata through dreams, history, and collective psyche, presenting the precarious condition of human engagement across histories of enslavement and freedom.”
“In Negro Mountain, horizontality gets its comeuppance in verticality, from the bottomless abyss of nightmarish dreams to mountains shrouded in lore and myth. In the dreamscapes of these poems, survival depends on both ‘Negro luck’ and a knack for being a bit ‘country.’ A wolf (or coyote) in sheep’s clothing, the fool on the hill is s/he who exposes ‘the story’s / sham,’ that ‘tiresome trope’ of captivity or freedom, criminality or servitude, violence or resignation. Negro Mountain turns the tables on the sacrosanct.”
“Haunted by the memory of a ‘colossal’ Black man who died on Negro Mountain, Giscombe’s text returns to the eponymous landmark of an obscure historical figure. Giscombe’s itinerant poetic speakers, in their restless incarnations, have mapped territories, ridden the rails, and followed foxes. In Negro Mountain, they walk with wolves, crossing boundaries, escaping enclosure, always shape-shifting as they guide the reader through passages where the self is also the mythic other.”
“A transtemporal cartography of a decidedly complex site, where ‘the devil’s in the long, long song,’ Negro Mountain rises powerfully out of the craggy terrain of race, history, and nomenclature. Dreams, locales, and a multiplicity of voices are here whispered, haunted, recorded, revealed. Poetry as dusk and interstice, prose as lucid, sinuous amalgamation: ‘The wolf is the thought.’”

Additional information

Dimensions 1 × 7 × 10 in