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TwERK
Poetry. African American Studies. TWERK unveils an identity shaped by popular media and history, code switching and cultural inclusivity. The poems, songs, and myths in this long-awaited first book are as rooted in lyric as in innovation, in Black music as in macaronic satire. TWERK evokes paradox, humor, and vulnerability, and it offers myriad avenues fueled by language, idiom, and vernacular. From a poet unafraid to take risks, this book asks only that we imagine America as it has always existed, an Americana beyond the English language."Here it is: a dope jam of dictions; a remixed, multicultural, polyphonic dance of vocabularies; a language of high stakes, hi-jinx, and hybridity. TWERK is subversive, vulnerable, and volatile. TwERK twists tongues. TwERK tweaks speech. Reading these amazing poems mostly makes me say, Wow! Open your ears to take this music in, open your mouth to say it out loud. And: Wow!"--Terrance Hayes"Tweaking parallel languages, rebooting and putting them to (hard, hard) work, TWERK's non-stop shimmy-shimmy embarks on an anime-iigjag idio-lingual-lectical booty-roll and doesn't come down until the break of dawn. La Reina de Harlem responds to Lorca's Big-Apple-opolis heteroglossia with her own inimitable animations, incantations and ululations, twisting tongues so mellifluously that you don't even realize you've been dancing on Saturn with Sun Ra for hours and still could have begged for more. Welcome LaTasha Diggs: this is her many-splendored night out!"--Maria Damon"From this time forward, TWERK, can refer to a collection of cultural coordinates of a radically transformed Americas. TWERK--is rare poetics, a vine enmeshed onyx slab of gypsum glyphs inscribed. Cut, swirly, and nervy, N. Diggs's fractal-linguistic urban chronicles deftly snip away at the lingering fears of a fugitive English's frisky explorations. In her first major work, N. Diggs doesn't so much 'find' culture as she conjures up the new emerging happy peoples herein. Five thousand updates--download now!"--Rodrigo Toscano
98 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
August 24, 2015
I read Digg's poetry in the anthology The &NOW AWARDS 3: The Best Innovative Writingand decided to make a list in my review of it of the authors I liked. For some reason, Diggs was the one I liked the most of everyone. The anthology was focused on experimental literature, so of course her poem, daggering kanji was quite eccentric. But what caught my heart was the fact that she was a polyglot. The only language that I am somewhat familiar with, that she had written in, was Spanish. I didn't understand most of it, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't what Diggs was expecting.
"dummy check dummy worth check check
dummy check my name check check dummy dummy
dummy check dummy lavender lollipop dummy dummy check check
dummy check dumby dumb dumb dah..."
from have you forgotten any personal property?
Twerk is a really odd work. The poetry didn't have a consistent rhyme, but it did have a tempo. The spaces in between the words and paragraphs, the formatting of the stanzas, the whole structuring of Twerk is a tribute and it contains the soul and rhythmic repetition of hip hop.
"k'k'kkrill k'k'kk'kosher k'k'kolohe k'k'kk'kinkajou
k'k'ku'ulala k'k'ku'ulala k'k'ku'ulala
k'k'ku'ulala
k'k'kunan k'k'kk'kinky k'kk'karma k'k'kosdu
k'k'ku'ulala k'k'ku'ulala k'k'ku'ulala
k'k'ku'ulala"
from daggering kanji.
Diggs writes in maybe over 5 languages. Sometimes she translates it, sometimes she doesn't, leaving some words as sort of like the various puzzle pieces of her poems. That was the beauty for a lot of the poems, some of them didn't really make much sense, meaning that you couldn't really understand what it meant because she spoke in various tongues, maybe someone across the globe would understand. The beauty was the ambiguousness and the wonder.
Poetry is more than the language of metaphors and similes, more than spats of imagery. The words themselves are poetry. They form that form minimalist scenes, compared to fiction where most of the time you're supposed to paint a whole canvas. They are the linguistic portraits that come in a variety of forms, within the words and the structure that surrounds them. Diggs has a more surrealist approach to her poetry, it is never emotive, instead it focuses on a structural and musical beauty, with various foreign languages and stanzas switching in different positions and dialects without warning and somehow still flowing coherently to make a linear poem.
"Good lord, you make my eyeliner sweat pika twins.
Peep this joint, I ain't feeling your vibe easy breezy.
No shogun coming from your tongue.
Mista Popo, mista Tom,
you queasy.
Where's your flying rug, homie?
Yama-uba bored, my agents gonna reward nada.
I shuffleboard smoochies in the land of the rising sun's cosplay papa.
from mista popo™ hollas @ jynx
There's a lot of pop culture references throughout Twerk, such as 90s anime like Dragon Ball Z in the poems mista popo™ hollas @ jynx and who you callin' a jynx? (after mista popo) the Japanese subculture called ganguro, and hip-hop hits from the 90s and early 2000s, one of the songs is titled "damn right it's betta than yours," which is possibly a reference to Kelis' "Milkshake." And the poem, (Boo Yaa) contains lyrics from the song "RID is coming" by a hip-hop called Boo Yaa T.R.I.B.E. After the last poem of the collection there is a section dedicated to explaining what languages some of the words belonged to and what stanzas or lines were appropriated. A lot of the poems in Twerk contain the words of about sections of websites, TV shows articles, and other people's songs and poetry. It is if she did a collage poetry of her favorite songs, TV shows, and research ventures by copying and pasting in Microsoft Word.
Twerk is a brilliant work that pays tribute to the ever evolving world of technology and Black American culture. With the choppy writing and even the book design, Diggs poetry could be at times, glitchy and spasmodic. The front cover is somewhat reminiscent of retro mod fashion, echoing Austin Powers to anybody who wasn't born during that time but is familiar with parodies of that time. The collection contains a sort of fascination that echoes the kungfu frenzy generation. It is an avant-garde tongue twisting tribute of the world's many people's including the languages of indigenous peoples, reminding everyone that English isn't the only way to speak in poetry.
(Honestly, I really hate that I have to do all of this formatting. There's a link to the blog post though.)
Rating: 5/5
Originally published here: http://wordsnotesandfiction.blogspot....
"dummy check dummy worth check check
dummy check my name check check dummy dummy
dummy check dummy lavender lollipop dummy dummy check check
dummy check dumby dumb dumb dah..."
from have you forgotten any personal property?
Twerk is a really odd work. The poetry didn't have a consistent rhyme, but it did have a tempo. The spaces in between the words and paragraphs, the formatting of the stanzas, the whole structuring of Twerk is a tribute and it contains the soul and rhythmic repetition of hip hop.
"k'k'kkrill k'k'kk'kosher k'k'kolohe k'k'kk'kinkajou
k'k'ku'ulala k'k'ku'ulala k'k'ku'ulala
k'k'ku'ulala
k'k'kunan k'k'kk'kinky k'kk'karma k'k'kosdu
k'k'ku'ulala k'k'ku'ulala k'k'ku'ulala
k'k'ku'ulala"
from daggering kanji.
Diggs writes in maybe over 5 languages. Sometimes she translates it, sometimes she doesn't, leaving some words as sort of like the various puzzle pieces of her poems. That was the beauty for a lot of the poems, some of them didn't really make much sense, meaning that you couldn't really understand what it meant because she spoke in various tongues, maybe someone across the globe would understand. The beauty was the ambiguousness and the wonder.
Poetry is more than the language of metaphors and similes, more than spats of imagery. The words themselves are poetry. They form that form minimalist scenes, compared to fiction where most of the time you're supposed to paint a whole canvas. They are the linguistic portraits that come in a variety of forms, within the words and the structure that surrounds them. Diggs has a more surrealist approach to her poetry, it is never emotive, instead it focuses on a structural and musical beauty, with various foreign languages and stanzas switching in different positions and dialects without warning and somehow still flowing coherently to make a linear poem.
"Good lord, you make my eyeliner sweat pika twins.
Peep this joint, I ain't feeling your vibe easy breezy.
No shogun coming from your tongue.
Mista Popo, mista Tom,
you queasy.
Where's your flying rug, homie?
Yama-uba bored, my agents gonna reward nada.
I shuffleboard smoochies in the land of the rising sun's cosplay papa.
from mista popo™ hollas @ jynx
There's a lot of pop culture references throughout Twerk, such as 90s anime like Dragon Ball Z in the poems mista popo™ hollas @ jynx and who you callin' a jynx? (after mista popo) the Japanese subculture called ganguro, and hip-hop hits from the 90s and early 2000s, one of the songs is titled "damn right it's betta than yours," which is possibly a reference to Kelis' "Milkshake." And the poem, (Boo Yaa) contains lyrics from the song "RID is coming" by a hip-hop called Boo Yaa T.R.I.B.E. After the last poem of the collection there is a section dedicated to explaining what languages some of the words belonged to and what stanzas or lines were appropriated. A lot of the poems in Twerk contain the words of about sections of websites, TV shows articles, and other people's songs and poetry. It is if she did a collage poetry of her favorite songs, TV shows, and research ventures by copying and pasting in Microsoft Word.
Twerk is a brilliant work that pays tribute to the ever evolving world of technology and Black American culture. With the choppy writing and even the book design, Diggs poetry could be at times, glitchy and spasmodic. The front cover is somewhat reminiscent of retro mod fashion, echoing Austin Powers to anybody who wasn't born during that time but is familiar with parodies of that time. The collection contains a sort of fascination that echoes the kungfu frenzy generation. It is an avant-garde tongue twisting tribute of the world's many people's including the languages of indigenous peoples, reminding everyone that English isn't the only way to speak in poetry.
(Honestly, I really hate that I have to do all of this formatting. There's a link to the blog post though.)
Rating: 5/5
Originally published here: http://wordsnotesandfiction.blogspot....
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September 23, 2022i read this, my professor's book. it was cool and weird! parts were pretty difficult and not intended for a generic reader. like trilingual poems. that's cool that you can do that and still be successful and published?
i liked how excessive it was. felt like a dog rolling around on the ground. playing w language, sinking into it. a little bit trolly... at times i felt like this was meant to be performance art for how adversarial it was. i liked the anime section bc i like anime. beyond that i liked the specificity of references—a poem for rocky aoki, for suri cruise. i'm kinda ashamed to say i liked the more narrative poems, bc they were easier to access/understand, i guess i'm a normie!!! i liked that they were spooky and sexual and ambivalent. i don't feel equipped to give this a numerical star review!
i liked how excessive it was. felt like a dog rolling around on the ground. playing w language, sinking into it. a little bit trolly... at times i felt like this was meant to be performance art for how adversarial it was. i liked the anime section bc i like anime. beyond that i liked the specificity of references—a poem for rocky aoki, for suri cruise. i'm kinda ashamed to say i liked the more narrative poems, bc they were easier to access/understand, i guess i'm a normie!!! i liked that they were spooky and sexual and ambivalent. i don't feel equipped to give this a numerical star review!
March 27, 2013
SO GOOD
February 24, 2014
This book is so new, so innovative that I can't really say I know what happened to me.
June 17, 2022
Very cool poems, Latasha is literally brilliant. Everything is a reference and the way she writes different sounds is incredible. These poems are funny, and powerful, full of love for the Black community, and btw also written in like 7 languages it’s soo nuts
August 2, 2022
Her use of multiple languages is very intriguing, but makes for a very difficult read. A section in the back giving explanations for many of the poems is much longer than it should be. Not my cup of tea.
February 28, 2017
It helped that I was able to see the author perform some of the poems. There is a great appreciation of languages and cultures throughout the book. It isn't an easy read.
November 12, 2020
A fun albeit disorienting experience.
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March 6, 2022
I’ve never read a worse poetry collection in my life. Never mind the mixture of another language, half the parts meant to be in English were not even decipherable.
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August 18, 2024¯\_(ツ)_/¯
September 8, 2023
A collection of poems written in multiple languages and dialects, exploring race, slang, and pop culture.
from April 18th: "& then Daddy made your Momma shut her mouth, // for in the silence of silent Scientology monsoons, / you inspire "oh so quiet...oh so still" solitude. // Your birth a most silent one. / & that dyslexia got to subsisting again."
from metromultilingopollonegrocucarachasblahblahblah: "the train is castrated by humdrum / joom badaaaaahhhhh / is the aroma of piss and junkies / hoarse covers of lean on me / stand by me lean on me"
from gamin' gabby: "trust your fields of prayers won't summon this earth, // where mountains crash beneath an ocean's thrust. / lonely words burn still days; you mime breech birth."
from April 18th: "& then Daddy made your Momma shut her mouth, // for in the silence of silent Scientology monsoons, / you inspire "oh so quiet...oh so still" solitude. // Your birth a most silent one. / & that dyslexia got to subsisting again."
from metromultilingopollonegrocucarachasblahblahblah: "the train is castrated by humdrum / joom badaaaaahhhhh / is the aroma of piss and junkies / hoarse covers of lean on me / stand by me lean on me"
from gamin' gabby: "trust your fields of prayers won't summon this earth, // where mountains crash beneath an ocean's thrust. / lonely words burn still days; you mime breech birth."
June 7, 2014
The thing I always have to remind myself is that this is sound poetry. Diggs' live readings of this are stunning, and although I think the book itself is beautifully laid out, I felt that I was unable to perform the text the same way Diggs performs it. Probably because I am not well-versed in the art of performance or even of reading aloud. I loved all of the pop culture references, and I loved Diggs' ability to blend those in flawlessly with cultural critique.
August 11, 2014
I am not quite smart enough for some of these, but that is my usual experience of poetry--not just poetry written in, um, eight? languages. Super cool, unlike pretty much anything else I've ever read.
March 10, 2015
I'll have to come back and edit this review when I've had some time to reflect on this collection, and when my mind isn't spinning o_O The subtraction of one star can be attributed to my multilingual inefficiency.
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October 10, 2013811.6 D573t 2013
August 11, 2014
I really enjoyed this book, but I felt like some of it was over my head.
March 3, 2023
So much fun!
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August 8, 2018In a video for the Whiting Foundation, Diggs says, "I want you to close the book, and think about the possibilities of transformation."
As a text this is a book hard to evaluate with a star rating so I'm gonna avoid that, genuinely need more time to really think about this. I almost want to experience this more as a performance/public piece, like I could imagine walking through an exhibit space or a long hallway or some other public space with excerpts of the poems just happening around you in all the different languages.
As a text this is a book hard to evaluate with a star rating so I'm gonna avoid that, genuinely need more time to really think about this. I almost want to experience this more as a performance/public piece, like I could imagine walking through an exhibit space or a long hallway or some other public space with excerpts of the poems just happening around you in all the different languages.
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January 16, 2019I'm not sure I can really rate this; all I can say is that the description in the GR entry is accurate and descriptive. It was unlike anything else I've ever read.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews