Taboo

"[Yusef Komunyakaa] has a near-revelatory capacity to give himself over to his subject matter and to the taut concision of his free verse . . . Dazzling.”—David Wojahn, Poetry

"Komunyakaa wonderfully achieves the combined mischief and moralizing of Catullus, one of his acknowledged heroes . . . He refuses to be trivial; and he even dares beauty."—April Bernard, The New York Times Book Review

"[Taboo] calls to mind Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman—the private gaze and the civic drum, purifying language, purifying history."—Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, The Washington Post Book World

"Komunyakaa, a master of restraint, uses form to concentrate deep emotions, and the ancient stories of Greece, Rome, and Africa, as well as works of art, to reveal the lineage of our own tragedies. In his last collection, Talking Dirty to the Gods, he limited himself to poems constructed of four-line stanzas. Here, in the first volume in his planned Wishbone trilogy, he writes in electrifying tercets as he pays homage to men and women caught in the cruel paradoxes of racism and the grinding wheels of history. Komunyakaa offers no background information, leaving it up to the reader to puzzle together carefully arranged shards, fragments, and remnants to discern the identities of the historic figures he portrays, which include 'Monticellan Sally' and Jeanne Duval, the beloved, respectively, of Jefferson and Baudelaire; the artist Edmonia Lewis; Thomas McKeller, an elevator operator who posed for John Singer Sargent; Ralph Ellison; and Satchmo. Glinting mosaics, Komunyakaa's poems—potent works of empathy, scholarship, and imagination—poignantly reclaim those who braved the treacherous borderland between white and black."—Booklist