Amnesiac: Poems

by Duriel E. Harris

Poet, musician, scholar, and singer, Duriel E. Harris has written an amazing book. As Sterling Plumpp tells us, her work "is a twenty-first century literary text emerging out of the prism of race, gender, and social class. It is eloquently postmodern funk and intimately original." She does this while telling us in poetry of extraordinarily high order an intimate, personal history, probing with her heart and intelligence into matters she has half passed over or forgotten. Perhaps Amnesiac is a term for tragic hero. In this case the tragic hero is a woman, a poet, and a singer.

Genres: Poetry

70 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Duriel E. Harris is a poet, performer, and sound artist. She is author of three print volumes of poetry, including her most recent, No Dictionary of a Living Tongue (Nightboat, 2017), Drag (2003) and Amnesiac: Poems (2010). Multi-genre works include her one-person theatrical performance Thingification, as well as Speleology (2011), a video collaboration with artist Scott Rankin. Recent and upcoming appearances include performances at the Lake Forest College Allan L. Carr Theatre, the Chicago Jazz Festival (with Douglas Ewart & Inventions), the Greenhouse Theater (Chicago), the Naropa Capitalocene, The Votive Poetics Workshop (New Zealand), and Festival Internacional de Poesía de La Habana (Cuba).

Cofounder of the avant garde poetry/performance trio The Black Took Collective, Harris has been a MacDowell and Millay Colony fellow and has received grants from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Her work has appeared in numerous venues, including BAX, Mandorla, The &Now Awards, Of Poetry & Protest, Ploughshares, Troubling the Line, and The Best of Fence; and her compositions have been translated into Polish, German, and Spanish. Harris earned degrees in Literature from Yale University and NYU, and a PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago Program for Writers.

The 2018 Offen Poet, Harris is an associate professor of English in the graduate creative writing program at Illinois State University and the Editor of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora.

Reviews

[Laurel Perez · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of poetry that just made me stop, repeatedly. I keep revisiting lines and ideas even when I have not been reading this furious collection that works to find meaning from human suffering. The forms used are as varied as the language, themes, typography, and images used throughout, which made my reading an experience like few others, and forced me to think about form and content in intriguing ways. I am in awe, and know that I will revisit again and again this work that asks one of the most difficult questions of human suffering, and what we are to take away.