Research Catalog

L-vis lives! : racemusic poems / Kevin Coval.

Title
L-vis lives! : racemusic poems / Kevin Coval.
Author
Coval, Kevin
Publication
Chicago, Ill. : Haymarket Books, 2011.

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StatusFormatAccessCall NumberItem Location
TextRequest in advance PS3603.O88825 L85 2011Off-site

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Details

Additional Authors
Coval, Kevin
Description
xvi, 103 p.; 22 cm.
Summary
FROM THE POET the Chicago Tribune calls the new voice of Chicago, comes L-vis Lives!, a bold new collection of poetry and prose exploring the collision of race, art, and appropriation in American culture. L-vis is an imagined persona, a representation of artists who have used and misused Black music. Like so many others who gained fame and fortune from their sampling, L-vis is as much a sincere artist as he is a thief. In Kevin Coval's poems, L-vis' story is equal parts forgotten history, autobiography, and re-imaginings. We see shades of Elvis Presley, the Beastie Boys, and Eminem, and meet some of history's more obscure whiteboy heroes and anti-heroes: legendary breakdancers, political activists, and music impresarios. A story of both artistic theft and radical invention, L-vis Lives! is a poetic novella on all of the possibilities and problems of post-racial" American culture-where Black art is still at times only fully accepted in a white face, and every once in a while an L-vis" comes along to step in to the void. i am a hero to most. the great hope of something other. a complex back-story. something other than the business of my father. Bland's antonym. jim crow's black sheep. the forgotten son left to rise in the darkness among the dis carded in the wild of working class, single mother hoods. a hero who transcends who translates the dis satisfactions of the plains; kids of kurt cobain, method man amphetamine, the odd Iowan who digs dirt and lights beyond the pig yard, spits nebraskan argot, hero to the heart land, middle brow(n) america "--
Subject
  • African Americans > Poetry
  • Popular music > Poetry
  • POETRY / American / General
Genre/Form
  • novels.
  • poetry.
  • Music
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • Novels
  • Romans.
  • Musique.
  • Poésie.
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references (page 103).
Processing Action (note)
  • committed to retain
Contents
Introduction / by Patricia Smith -- Life side -- Quarters in the don't play arcade -- Death side -- Broke/////////beat/////////intermezzo -- Whiteboy I could've been : a suite for John Walker Lindh.
ISBN
  • 9781608461516 (pbk.)
  • 1608461513 (pbk.)
LCCN
^^2011026562
OCLC
709681365
Owning Institutions
Harvard Library