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Comments
on Roger Bonair-Agard's Book
Coming
from the same youthful, "hip-hop-in-letters"
generation as Rosal, Roger Bonair-Agard, a star in the
poetry slam world, demonstrates the strength of the
poems in his first book, Tarnish and Masquerade
(Rattapallax, 104 pages, $12).
This collection of road- tested material has been masterfully
reassembled under a cover and binding. It is a revelatory
experience to read poems that play as well on the page
as they do orally -- perhaps the book offers a new,
higher form of poetics, similar in vein to Tyehimba
Jess' leadbelly or Patricia Smith's Teahouse
of the Almighty.
These books are exciting to be around, to see mature
and become accomplished works, activating so many visceral
levels at once. And while there are wonderful similarities
amongst this group, once inside the book, it is all
Bonair-Agard. Tarnish is broken into five acts
(think of a traditional tragedy), many of which speak
to Bonair's Trinidad background. An expatriot of the
islands, these poems explore a longing for home, a bold
criticism of familial and societal injustices, all played
to the backbeat of a steel drum. -- Chicago
Sun Times
"Bonair-Agard
is a poet who fixes his experience with memory and uses
memory image as analyzer of his experience. A poet of
live language mastering it's literary "statement". Someone
whose poetry can be entered and felt and understood.
An impressive work." -- Amiri Baraka
"In
this collection, Roger Bonair-Agard's lyricism is sharpened
by a deep sense of politics, a profoundly muscular intelligence
and a sensuality that can be wholly
and beautifully dangerous. It is always wonderful to
hear music in a line. Bonair-Agard is engaged with his
world and drags you sweetly into his imaginings through
the sheer force of his verse." -- Kwame Dawes
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"These
sunwashed revelations -- this lilting, uproarious, precise
gospel -- brings so much to the table that the reader
is nearly overwhelmed. Roger Bonair-Agard is his own
revolution, a deft purveyor of unflinching politics,
stark sensuality and the relentless drum of the island
home that beckons from every page. There is simply no
resisting these stanzas, absolutely no way to turn away
from what they will do to you." -- Patricia
Smith
"In
Tarnish and Masquerade, Roger Bonair-Agard attempts
to render a history of love and indignation. The collection
begins in a backyard of Trinidad, and traces (through
gaelle and underworld and prank and Brooklyn) a music
of steel-drum tri-tones, a rage both historical and
intimate, and a joy entangled in -- and excavated out
of -- one man's wanderings and witness, his enigmatic
sense of home. Perhaps you have heard some of these
poems in Bonair-Agard's own detonating tenor, bounding
off the walls, gutting the space of its silences. Become
familiar again with those poems. Read them yourself
aloud. You may hear your own voice transformed. You
may not recognize the sound. It is your English, riled
and rechristened in the bardic carnivals of heat, laughter,
and calypso." -- Patrick Rosal
"Roger
Bonair-Agard's careful mix of resistance, pride, regret
and joy is a resonant hymn to the exile. These strong,
full-hearted poems describe the longing for home and
tradition in a land with people and problems not of
one's own making; reading them is a dance with rhythm
and desire." -- Daphne Gottlieb
"Roger
Bonair Agard has solved two very big problems for himself
? What to say and how to say it. With Tarnish and
Masquerade he's cleared a space around himself and
declared that it belongs to him. That space lies at
the intersection where Walcott, the ol' Calypsonians
and the fellas who like to talk shit on the corner meet
and drink and discuss life in what appears to be incidentally
inventive language, producing what we recognize and
value as art." -- Colin Channer
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