Some Are Drowning

by Reginald Shepherd

Overview

This first collection of poems enacts the struggle of a young black gay man in his search for identity.  Many voices haunt these poems: black and white, male and female, the oppressor’s voice as well as the oppressed.  The poet’s aim, finally, is to rescue some portion of the drowned and the drowning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822955474
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	01/06/1995
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Reginald Shepherd (1963–2008) was the author of five previous books of poetry: Fata Morgana; Otherhood; Wrong; Angel, Interrupted; and Some Are Drowning. His work has been widely anthologized, and has appeared in four editions of The Best American Poetry and two Pushcart Prize anthologies.

Editorial Reviews

This poetry feels passionately truthful and his own, a gay young black man adrift between worlds, transcending the fragments of his life in song.”
—Poetry Flash


"Shepherd's poems are reckless in the best sense. Passionate, brainy, and sad, they chronicle the mysteries, small and large, of emotional and intellectual life in language that's a weird amalgam of Latinate and Anglo-Saxon, richly original and distinctively American. Reading them is like listening to a good talker on a tear. He tells secrets that might turn out to be your own."
—Chase Twichell

From the Publisher

Like the Greek myth of Tantalus, whose punishment in Hades was to suffer from thirst while standing in the midst of a lake, Shepherd's first book is, well, tantalizing: his edgy, refined voice seems entirely at ease while swinging between versions of Greek myths, bitter love poems, and explorations into what it means to filter white Western history through a black heritage. This last subject informs Shepherd's best writing. In ``Slaves'' a white sailor on a sinking slave ship is mockingly eulogized, with chilling effect. Shepherd fathoms such themes without letting potential bathos interrupt the poetry-or, as a narrator puts it, ``When shall I be like the swallow, singing the rape of my voice, but singing past the rape, something my own to sing?'' This seemingly offhand question resounds through many poems, not always in Shepherd's favor. For example, he often couches poems in Greek mythology, either thematically or metaphorically, when they might be more interesting left to their own devices. At other times, lines like ``Desires wide as burning rain forests in Brazil'' counter an otherwise clean use of simile. But these are minor grievances in a promising first collection. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Winner of the 1993 Associated Writing Programs' Award Series in Poetry, selected by Carolyn Forche. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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