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Magic City
An award-winning poet evokes his childhood in Louisiana.
Komunyakaa vividly evokes his childhood in Bogalusa, Louisiana, once a center of Klan activity, and later a focus of Civil Rights efforts. He portrays a child's dawning awareness of the natural and social order around him, rhythms of life in the community, the constant struggle for survival in the face of poverty and racism, the adolescent's awakening sexuality, the beginnings of the poet's awareness of his life and community as it exists in the context of history, and his emerging understanding of his own identity.
Komunyakaa vividly evokes his childhood in Bogalusa, Louisiana, once a center of Klan activity, and later a focus of Civil Rights efforts. He portrays a child's dawning awareness of the natural and social order around him, rhythms of life in the community, the constant struggle for survival in the face of poverty and racism, the adolescent's awakening sexuality, the beginnings of the poet's awareness of his life and community as it exists in the context of history, and his emerging understanding of his own identity.
68 pages, Paperback
First published October 9, 1992
About the author
Yusef Komunyakaa
96 books213 followersYusef Komunyakaa (born April 29, 1947) is an American poet who teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for Neon Vernacular and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Komunyakaa received the 2007 Louisiana Writer Award for his enduring contribution to the poetry world.
His subject matter ranges from the black general experience through rural Southern life before the Civil Rights time period and his experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War.
(from Wikipedia)
His subject matter ranges from the black general experience through rural Southern life before the Civil Rights time period and his experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War.
(from Wikipedia)
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 38 reviews
August 27, 2008
I got to hear Yusef read in 2007 and he has the most incredible reading voice I have ever heard... I liked his poetry, but hearing him read truly captures the kind of grit and lurking-Old-Testament-prophet-vibe of his work. Pretty incredible.
January 6, 2024
King of line breaks and syntax. // Exam notes: why so stichic? Venus’s-flytraps; The Millpond; Boys in Dresses
June 24, 2007
I am in China without my beloved piles of books so I can't actually remember anything specific from this collection. I love it though. I think that this poem I especially like might be in here, about watching a Vietnamese woman burn during the Vietnam war. It's all, She burns like vodka/She burns like this/She burns like that... Okay this review sucks. But the poem is beautiful.
July 10, 2020
Every time I read or reread a Yusef collection in full, I think, this is it, this is his best book. Love the neorealist angle of this. Louisiana love letter with a lot of joy and hurt in it. Immersive as a collection of short poems can get. Makes me think of Jean Eustache's hometown ethnographies and autofictions. I can't help but think of the strip club when I read that title though.
March 5, 2019
Taken as a whole, Magic City builds on centuries of verse in English: stichic epic, metaphysical wit, Whitmanian American pastoralia, and a scintillating sprung rhythm. However, the facts of white American brutality against African Americans during this time period and throughout American history cannot be ignored. As the last line of the collection states, the city of magic is marred by both love, and violence. Young men in these poems are tarred and feathered, women are beaten, the Klan is lurking at every corner waiting for the slightest provocation to unleash their hatred on the African American community of Bogalusa.
In the final poem, Komunyakaa describes a scene where he and a woman are about to embrace, to kiss, when some “joker cut in / & pulled her into his arms.” However, Komunyakaa writes:
I was still swept onward by the timbre
Of her breath, her body
In some ways, the woman’s breath and body are a synecdoche of Komunyakaa’s poems. The iambic pentameter structures the first line of these two (a rare moment in Magic City). The timbre of his poems, matching the rhythm of the breath that is the pentameter, are what sweeps us onward through Magic City despite the painful love and violence that occur in its pages. The character and quality of Komunyakaa’s poems are musical masterpieces that sweep the speaker and reader off our feet, and carry us down the river, through the rough-and-tumble world of Magic City.
In the final poem, Komunyakaa describes a scene where he and a woman are about to embrace, to kiss, when some “joker cut in / & pulled her into his arms.” However, Komunyakaa writes:
I was still swept onward by the timbre
Of her breath, her body
In some ways, the woman’s breath and body are a synecdoche of Komunyakaa’s poems. The iambic pentameter structures the first line of these two (a rare moment in Magic City). The timbre of his poems, matching the rhythm of the breath that is the pentameter, are what sweeps us onward through Magic City despite the painful love and violence that occur in its pages. The character and quality of Komunyakaa’s poems are musical masterpieces that sweep the speaker and reader off our feet, and carry us down the river, through the rough-and-tumble world of Magic City.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 22, 2017
I wonder what death tastes like.
A very good poetry collection dealing with topics of racism, childhood and the loss of innocence. Komunyakaa's style is interesting and I adored it. My favourite poem from this collection is Venus’s-flytraps; I must have read it a hundred times already and I can still not get enough of it, especially of this part:
Sometimes I toss the butterflies
Back into the air.
I wish I knew why
The music in my head
Makes me scared.
But I know things
I don’t supposed to know.
I could start walking
& never stop.
These yellow flowers
Go on forever.
Almost to Detroit.
Almost to the sea.
Some of my other favourites are Seasons Between Yes & No, Happiness and Looking for Choctaw.
A very good poetry collection dealing with topics of racism, childhood and the loss of innocence. Komunyakaa's style is interesting and I adored it. My favourite poem from this collection is Venus’s-flytraps; I must have read it a hundred times already and I can still not get enough of it, especially of this part:
Sometimes I toss the butterflies
Back into the air.
I wish I knew why
The music in my head
Makes me scared.
But I know things
I don’t supposed to know.
I could start walking
& never stop.
These yellow flowers
Go on forever.
Almost to Detroit.
Almost to the sea.
Some of my other favourites are Seasons Between Yes & No, Happiness and Looking for Choctaw.
March 16, 2021
“The hot words/ Swarmed out of my mouth like African bees” in so many of these powerful poems by Komunyakaa about the poignant memories of boyhood and the horrors and injustices of growing up amid the rancor and racism of unredeemed and unrepentant White Southerners.
Favorite poems:
“Venus’s-flytraps”
“The Whistle”
“Yellowjackets”
“History Lessons”
“Albino”
“My Father’s Love Letters”
“Believing in Iron”
“Poetics of Paperwood”
“Knights of the White Camellia & Deacons of Defense”
Favorite poems:
“Venus’s-flytraps”
“The Whistle”
“Yellowjackets”
“History Lessons”
“Albino”
“My Father’s Love Letters”
“Believing in Iron”
“Poetics of Paperwood”
“Knights of the White Camellia & Deacons of Defense”
Read
December 27, 2022I don’t think enough people list Yusef Komunyakaa when they catalog key environmentally engaged poets of our time, but we all should. In so many of his poems, you’ll find the greater than human world living alongside the human, as richly endowed with personality and will as any of the human figures in the poems. In fact, sometimes the earth and ponds and blackberries and grass and cows of Komunyakaa’s early poems seem to have more will and sense of self-possession than the human actors on his pages. I must confess that there seems to be a running theme in these little notes I’m writing for you here. I wanted to bring attention to work published before 2010 that readers should keep on their radar; and in several cases, other writers, editors, and publishers have also made it their mission to ensure readers are able to access this work today. I looked up publication details about Magic City (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 1992), my personal favorite of all my most beloved Komunyakaa collections, and discovered I’m a month late celebrating a new Komunyakaa volume—Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2021 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021)—that will give readers a chance to peruse a large body of his seminal work. You can see from the title of this new book that Komunyakaa centers Earth in his poetic imagination. If you want to take a deep dive into Komunyakaa’s complex and uncompromising environmental vision, I recommend you get your hands on his newest collection as well as many of his early books, like Magic City and Neon Vernacular (Wesleyan University Press, 1993).
Review published originally with Orion Magazine: https://orionmagazine.org/2021/07/thi...
Review published originally with Orion Magazine: https://orionmagazine.org/2021/07/thi...
February 22, 2018
Magic City is lyrical beauty of a book that addresses a Black boy's burgeoning awareness of the natural world, the familial world, and the larger community around him. The speaker in the opening poem, Venus's-flytraps, is 5 years old; the speaker in the closing poem, Butterfly-Toed Shoes, is in his teens/early adulthood. (Komunyakaa read flytraps years ago for River Styx in St. Louis; that recording sings still after countless listens). This child has his eyes wide open and "know(s) things (he) don't supposed to know" about girls and boys, what adults do, about planting and slaughter, and about injustice and racism. April's Anarchy, The Millpond, and Immolatus and among my favorites, but these lines from Slam, Dunk, & Hook go a long way toward summing up this book: "We had moves we didn't know/We had. Our bodies spun/On swivels of bone & faith,/Through a lyric slipknot/Of joy, & we knew we were/Beautiful & dangerous."
July 25, 2026
Car lights rubbed against our windows,
Ravenous as snow wolves.
A brick fell into the living room like a black body,
& a riot of drunk curses
Left the gladioli & zinnias
Maimed. Double dares
Took root in night soil.
The whistle boiled
Gutbucket underneath silence
& burned with wrath.
But by then Daddy was with Uncle James
Outside The Crossroad,
Their calloused fingers caressing the .38
On the seat of the pickup;
Maybe it was the pine-scented moonglow
That made him look so young
& faceless, wearing his mother's powder blue
Sunday dress & veiled hat.
Read
March 17, 2012"I am this space/my body believes in," ends "The Unnatural State of the Unicorn," the first poem in Yusef Komunyakaa 's 1986 volume, I APOLOGIZE FOR THE EYES IN MY HEAD (Wesleyan). That the body itself, apart from mind or soul, can possess beliefs--or memories or hopes or regrets or revelations--comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with Komunyakaa's work, or to anyone discovering this poet for the first time through NEON VERNACULAR, which includes rich samplings from books now out of print. The tense, often colloquial language of Komunyakaa's tautly lineated poems in this volume and in his newest, MAGIC CITY, enacts on the page the muscle and movement of the human body as it walks, talks, makes love,
sings the blues, even kills. Indeed, not since Berryman has an American poet developed and then used a relatively standardized style to such effect. Short lines, short sentences, fragments, and the ampersand appear in Komunyakaa's earliest work as well as in his most recent. These technical
devices are exploited with increasing skill in poems whose subjects range from lyric meditations on love and jazz to Komunyakaa's experiences in Vietnam to his boyhood in Louisiana.
The short-lined poem, a staple of the Deep Image movement, has seemed stale and tiresome in recent years, as too often it has been shaped by poets who equate the line with a unit of syntax. While this lineation may have once appeared interesting in Stanley Kunitz's THE LAYERS (OP) or the earlier work of his protegée Louise Gluck, too often it creates a rhythmic portentousness. Komunyakaa mostly avoids this pitfall, in part because of his sensitive and well~tuned ear, in part because he knows that a short line as well as a long one should possess both content and integrity.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of Komunyakaa's development is how his unique sense of line and rhythm, though deriyed from his deep understanding of jazz, suddenly comes into focus when he addresses not the subject of music--"Villon/Leadbelly," "Copacetic Mingus," "Elegy for Thelonius"--but war. TOYS IN A FIELD, published in1986 by Black River Press, and DIEN CAI DAU, issued more widely in 1988 by Wesleyan, mark the beginning of Komunyakaa's most compelling work, both volumes resulting from the poet's tour of duty in Vietnam. At first it might appear
strange that such material would sharpen and focus the accomplishments of LOST IN THE BONEWHEEL FACTORY (OP, 1979), COPACETIC (Wesleyan, 1984), and the aforementioned I APOLOGIZE FOR THE EYES IN MY HEAD, Southeast Asia and the horrors enacted there being very far removed from the world of bayous and crawfish and Big Mama Thornton and hoodoo--and lynchings, or the ever-present fear thereof. Or maybe not so far removed. For the steamy jungles of Vietnam must have seemed like the humid Louisiana landscape of Komunyakaa's childhood become nighnnarish. "Camouflaging the Chimera" exemplifies both the terrifyingly phantasmagoric quality of the poems in these two collections and Komunyakaa's characteristic style at its most finely tuned and wrought.
... Chameleons
crawled our spines, changing from day
to night: green to gold,
gold to black. But we waited
till the moon touched metal,
till something almost broke
inside us. VC struggled
with the hillside, like black silk
wrestling iron through grass.
We weren't there. The river ran
through our bones. Small animals took refuge
against our bodies; we held our breath,
ready to spring the L-shaped
ambush, as a world revolved
under each man's eyelid.
A return to an earlier world is the most obvious connecting thread between the poems in MAGIC CITY and the "New Poems" of NEON VERNACULAR. Though Komunyakaa's childhood memories of Bogalusa are scarred by savage racism in poems like "The Whistle," "The Steel Plate," and "History Lesson," a deep but unsentimental love of place and family invests these recent poems with a new and expansive warmth, at times even gentleness. The modulation of tone leads him to experiment with a child~like narrative voice reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop in MAGIC CITY's opener, "Venus Flytraps," and with longer, sectioned poems as well. The virtuosic "Changes; or Reveries at a Window Overlooking a Country Road, with Two Women Talking Blues in the Kitchen," a double-columned piece that counterpoints two women's gossip about local love and loss and betrayal with a meditation on jazz and poetry, is a stunning achievement; no less impressive in its own way is "Birds on a Powerline," which ends with the words of
Komunyakaa's grandmother after his rerum from Vietnam: "Jesus, I promised you. Now/He's home safe, I'm ready. / My traveling shoes on. My teeth/ In. I got on clean underwear."
The phrase "poet's poet" is overused and probably not terribly helpful to general readers who sample a book or two of poetry each year, staring dazedly at publications such as this one and trying to decide what's really worth their while--and their 10 bucks. An immersion in Yusef
Komunyakaa's poetry and its exactingly crafted restraint is powerful persuasion against the hyperbole that has become, unfortunately, the language of the reviewer's tribe; thus, attempting to take this poet's graceful and searing reserve as example seems the most fitting tribute in a review
of his two first-rate collections.
(originally published in THE BLOOMSBURY REVIEW)
sings the blues, even kills. Indeed, not since Berryman has an American poet developed and then used a relatively standardized style to such effect. Short lines, short sentences, fragments, and the ampersand appear in Komunyakaa's earliest work as well as in his most recent. These technical
devices are exploited with increasing skill in poems whose subjects range from lyric meditations on love and jazz to Komunyakaa's experiences in Vietnam to his boyhood in Louisiana.
The short-lined poem, a staple of the Deep Image movement, has seemed stale and tiresome in recent years, as too often it has been shaped by poets who equate the line with a unit of syntax. While this lineation may have once appeared interesting in Stanley Kunitz's THE LAYERS (OP) or the earlier work of his protegée Louise Gluck, too often it creates a rhythmic portentousness. Komunyakaa mostly avoids this pitfall, in part because of his sensitive and well~tuned ear, in part because he knows that a short line as well as a long one should possess both content and integrity.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of Komunyakaa's development is how his unique sense of line and rhythm, though deriyed from his deep understanding of jazz, suddenly comes into focus when he addresses not the subject of music--"Villon/Leadbelly," "Copacetic Mingus," "Elegy for Thelonius"--but war. TOYS IN A FIELD, published in1986 by Black River Press, and DIEN CAI DAU, issued more widely in 1988 by Wesleyan, mark the beginning of Komunyakaa's most compelling work, both volumes resulting from the poet's tour of duty in Vietnam. At first it might appear
strange that such material would sharpen and focus the accomplishments of LOST IN THE BONEWHEEL FACTORY (OP, 1979), COPACETIC (Wesleyan, 1984), and the aforementioned I APOLOGIZE FOR THE EYES IN MY HEAD, Southeast Asia and the horrors enacted there being very far removed from the world of bayous and crawfish and Big Mama Thornton and hoodoo--and lynchings, or the ever-present fear thereof. Or maybe not so far removed. For the steamy jungles of Vietnam must have seemed like the humid Louisiana landscape of Komunyakaa's childhood become nighnnarish. "Camouflaging the Chimera" exemplifies both the terrifyingly phantasmagoric quality of the poems in these two collections and Komunyakaa's characteristic style at its most finely tuned and wrought.
... Chameleons
crawled our spines, changing from day
to night: green to gold,
gold to black. But we waited
till the moon touched metal,
till something almost broke
inside us. VC struggled
with the hillside, like black silk
wrestling iron through grass.
We weren't there. The river ran
through our bones. Small animals took refuge
against our bodies; we held our breath,
ready to spring the L-shaped
ambush, as a world revolved
under each man's eyelid.
A return to an earlier world is the most obvious connecting thread between the poems in MAGIC CITY and the "New Poems" of NEON VERNACULAR. Though Komunyakaa's childhood memories of Bogalusa are scarred by savage racism in poems like "The Whistle," "The Steel Plate," and "History Lesson," a deep but unsentimental love of place and family invests these recent poems with a new and expansive warmth, at times even gentleness. The modulation of tone leads him to experiment with a child~like narrative voice reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop in MAGIC CITY's opener, "Venus Flytraps," and with longer, sectioned poems as well. The virtuosic "Changes; or Reveries at a Window Overlooking a Country Road, with Two Women Talking Blues in the Kitchen," a double-columned piece that counterpoints two women's gossip about local love and loss and betrayal with a meditation on jazz and poetry, is a stunning achievement; no less impressive in its own way is "Birds on a Powerline," which ends with the words of
Komunyakaa's grandmother after his rerum from Vietnam: "Jesus, I promised you. Now/He's home safe, I'm ready. / My traveling shoes on. My teeth/ In. I got on clean underwear."
The phrase "poet's poet" is overused and probably not terribly helpful to general readers who sample a book or two of poetry each year, staring dazedly at publications such as this one and trying to decide what's really worth their while--and their 10 bucks. An immersion in Yusef
Komunyakaa's poetry and its exactingly crafted restraint is powerful persuasion against the hyperbole that has become, unfortunately, the language of the reviewer's tribe; thus, attempting to take this poet's graceful and searing reserve as example seems the most fitting tribute in a review
of his two first-rate collections.
(originally published in THE BLOOMSBURY REVIEW)
December 26, 2023
I loved the environment that this collection was able to create. A strong reflection on the fable-like, mythic qualities of childhood. I think a lot about strong verbs/nouns in poetry, and Komunyaaka’s poems are masterfully crafted in that regard. I did find myself wanting a bit more of a confessional quality/more vulnerability.
June 10, 2019
"My Father's Love Letters" is one of the most perfect poems I've ever read.
August 30, 2020
A portrait of a personal history in Civil Rights Louisiana. Non lyrical, narrative poems. He's a master of diction and succinctness.
years-ago-i-read-duh
October 18, 2020I used to say "im dense to poetry" like im monica geller SMH! this book was easy to understand.
Read
December 29, 2023Thanks to Sadiyah for my first poetry collection ☺️
March 13, 2024
this man is a genius.
August 7, 2026
day 6 of sealey challenge 2026.
August 3, 2018
killer lines and vicious pictures
July 22, 2013
Undulating Perceptions
I had trouble relating to a lot of Komunyakka’s subject matter because I didn’t grow up in Louisiana during the Civil Rights movement, nor do I come from an impoverished background or have encountered racism in my time. However, I do enjoy Komunyakka’s innocent portrayals of his childhood. He seems to have very vivid memories of how he felt and what he saw as a kid; he remembers every little detail. In “Playthings,” we can all relate to the authentic happiness of childlike play: “My Mason jar of lightning bugs/Flickered” and discovering our attraction to the opposite sex: “as March bullied/Raintrees & a girl/In a crimson dress.” The poet examine vignettes of his youth, and his adventurous, innocent, and curious tone creates “spaciousness” in his poems, as Hoagland would describe. With each newly added scene, he lets the poem undulate by building upon his past images, allowing the poem to breath, creating both “inhalations and exhalations,” according to Hoagland.
In addition to speaking from a boy’s point of view with repetition of the word “Daddy” throughout, Komunyakka incorporates different shifts in perspectives to create what Instructor Montesonti calls “emotional engagement.” His dialogical poems permit him to capture familiar family voices. In this way, his poems feel journalistic, as he creates a 360-degree view of his small town world. Everyone the speaker comes into contact, whether its his Grandmother chanting: “Africa Africa” or Mama Mary gossiping: “Mama Mary was there to repeat/The lowdown: ''It's ungodly,” everything is fare game as subject matter. Hoagland describes this as “theatrical enterprise” and “tonal variety of different voices and attitudes.” This ability to remember the small stuff that most people overlook, this talent for recreating his past with such precision, this is the essence of a great writer with mastery of tone.
What I most enjoy about the poet’s tone is his ability to zoom in with close observation (“Men capped their thermoses”); it’s so personal, and then zoom back out (“The melody/Men & women built lives around”), to capture a universal feeling, as if he was producing a film rather than a poem. This gives his poems a “freeing” “playful” and “experimental” tone as Hoagland would describe.
What I found complex and ironical about his tone is that although the
poet lived in desperate times and was born into an underprivileged family, his attitude, how he “holds the world” as Hoagland would say, is hopeful despite his internal conflicts and external struggles. Sometimes his tone is flip and honest like “polka dots and moon beams never made the swelling go down.” But other times, he paints such a positive, but ignorant picture of his neighborhood’s happiness: “Women dabbed loud perfume/Behind their ears & set tables/Covered with flowered oilcloth.” These are people who value simple happiness over materialism. And this is a boy who can find joy even in ritual labor: “The hurt in my arms/Made me happy.”
Finally, I like how the poet uses nature to set a bleak tone. Instead of a close up, intrusive view on his characters, he creates distance from his human subjects and opens up the poem to impersonal objects like:
“Wild geese moved like a wedge/Between sky & sagebrush” and “steel-gray evening.” In his poems, animals and even weather, like their human counterparts, are all struggling to survive.
[word count: 552]
I had trouble relating to a lot of Komunyakka’s subject matter because I didn’t grow up in Louisiana during the Civil Rights movement, nor do I come from an impoverished background or have encountered racism in my time. However, I do enjoy Komunyakka’s innocent portrayals of his childhood. He seems to have very vivid memories of how he felt and what he saw as a kid; he remembers every little detail. In “Playthings,” we can all relate to the authentic happiness of childlike play: “My Mason jar of lightning bugs/Flickered” and discovering our attraction to the opposite sex: “as March bullied/Raintrees & a girl/In a crimson dress.” The poet examine vignettes of his youth, and his adventurous, innocent, and curious tone creates “spaciousness” in his poems, as Hoagland would describe. With each newly added scene, he lets the poem undulate by building upon his past images, allowing the poem to breath, creating both “inhalations and exhalations,” according to Hoagland.
In addition to speaking from a boy’s point of view with repetition of the word “Daddy” throughout, Komunyakka incorporates different shifts in perspectives to create what Instructor Montesonti calls “emotional engagement.” His dialogical poems permit him to capture familiar family voices. In this way, his poems feel journalistic, as he creates a 360-degree view of his small town world. Everyone the speaker comes into contact, whether its his Grandmother chanting: “Africa Africa” or Mama Mary gossiping: “Mama Mary was there to repeat/The lowdown: ''It's ungodly,” everything is fare game as subject matter. Hoagland describes this as “theatrical enterprise” and “tonal variety of different voices and attitudes.” This ability to remember the small stuff that most people overlook, this talent for recreating his past with such precision, this is the essence of a great writer with mastery of tone.
What I most enjoy about the poet’s tone is his ability to zoom in with close observation (“Men capped their thermoses”); it’s so personal, and then zoom back out (“The melody/Men & women built lives around”), to capture a universal feeling, as if he was producing a film rather than a poem. This gives his poems a “freeing” “playful” and “experimental” tone as Hoagland would describe.
What I found complex and ironical about his tone is that although the
poet lived in desperate times and was born into an underprivileged family, his attitude, how he “holds the world” as Hoagland would say, is hopeful despite his internal conflicts and external struggles. Sometimes his tone is flip and honest like “polka dots and moon beams never made the swelling go down.” But other times, he paints such a positive, but ignorant picture of his neighborhood’s happiness: “Women dabbed loud perfume/Behind their ears & set tables/Covered with flowered oilcloth.” These are people who value simple happiness over materialism. And this is a boy who can find joy even in ritual labor: “The hurt in my arms/Made me happy.”
Finally, I like how the poet uses nature to set a bleak tone. Instead of a close up, intrusive view on his characters, he creates distance from his human subjects and opens up the poem to impersonal objects like:
“Wild geese moved like a wedge/Between sky & sagebrush” and “steel-gray evening.” In his poems, animals and even weather, like their human counterparts, are all struggling to survive.
[word count: 552]
March 5, 2008
Magic City is a collection of childhood narratives that contrast the naïve voice of an African American boy with the intense historical context of Louisiana in the 1950’s, rife with Klan activity and industrial development. It traces the narrator’s burgeoning sexual identity, the effects of industrialization (posing it as a modern form of slavery), and the racism so prevalent in the time just before the Civil Rights Movement. The poems are good studies of effective line breaks (“Venus’s-flytraps”), use of color imagery (“The Whistle”) and fusing objects with identity formation (“Mismatched Shoes”).
March 19, 2014
Perhaps more than any of Komunyakaa's other collections of poetry, Magic City is grounded in his experiences coming of age in a Louisiana town that was at one time a center of Klan activity, and at a later date, a center of Civil Rights activity. Centering on questions of adolescence and race, the book resounds with the rhythms of blues, basketball, and southern living. Many of the poems here will stop readers in their tracks--they are just that powerful and ring with that much truth--and others feel almost documentary in nature. All together, it's a smart and worthwhile collection, and one to be discussed.
Overall, recommended.
Overall, recommended.
January 17, 2015
This book is a revelation! It is one of the few books of poetry that I have finished in its entirety and I must say that it makes a great case for why one should read poetry. Through this book, I experienced wonderment. I highly recommend it to anyone with a love for words and a love for living.
PS- For my poetry class we had to memorize a couple lines that we found beautiful. I memorized this from his poem: Sunday Afternoons.
"I knew life/ began where I stood in the dark/looking out into the light/and that sometimes I could see/everything through nothing."
PS- For my poetry class we had to memorize a couple lines that we found beautiful. I memorized this from his poem: Sunday Afternoons.
"I knew life/ began where I stood in the dark/looking out into the light/and that sometimes I could see/everything through nothing."
December 15, 2008
Komunyakaa's works is so fabolous that every time you read it, you are able to find some allusion to something really important in society in which he grew up. I really like "Immolatus" because of its many metaphors, similes and many other literary techniquest that he uses. His works make me feel close to a nature because its setting represents a rural town where Industrialization is not able to to destroyed.
May 19, 2008
LOVE this book. Such a clear look into childhood with the innocence of that time, but also the wisdom of adulthood. The first poem in the book, "Venus' Flytraps is the best. If I had one complaint, it's the constancy of the form, it becomes a little exhausting after awhile, especially given the length of the book.
February 3, 2011
I picked this up off a community bookshelf. The accolades seemed on point; what did I have to lose? I have been on an extended tour of excellent reading material. Komunyakaa, who grew up in Bogalusa, offers a world that is as familiar as it alien to me. This is one more author who I am going to be obsessively following for years I am sure.
March 9, 2015
An amazing instructor introduced us to this author and a student from one of his later classes shared this book with me. I would be lying if I said it's an easy read. Far from it. There are many "raw" visions of memories shared here. Some easier to relate to than others, but a must read for any literature student!
January 28, 2013
Some of Komunyakaa's most accessible pieces I've read. I am a fan, and find most all of his work stunning, but this volume is unique in that it captures memories of every sense from his childhood growing up in Louisiana.
Read
August 23, 2007I (re)learned how to write poetry after reading "Venus's-Flytraps".
February 10, 2008
My first taste of Kumanyakaa (sp?) was not pleasant, some translation of a famous play or something, so I wasn't expecting much out of this one, but I was wrong. Magic City is fantastic.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 38 reviews