Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth

Starred review from December 21, 2020
With 140 poems, including 12 new works, this dazzling collection makes a definitive case for the Pulitzer Prize–winning Komunyakaa as a monumental and singular American voice. A jazzy master of enjambment and arresting opening lines, Komunyakaa synthesizes natural history, myth, and wide-ranging intellectual curiosity into sensory acts of witness. Rarely has lyrical precision felt this muscular; Komunyakaa likes to invoke a reader’s senses “as the mind/ runs to keep up.” His connoisseurship of blues, soul, and jazz is vividly rendered: “An echo of Sam Cooke hangs/ in bruised air, & for a minute// the silence of Fate reigns over/ day & night.” Frequent evocations of battle—informed by his own experience of war—provide subtle moral commentary: “After a nightlong white-hot hellfire/ of blue steel, we rolled into Baghdad,/ plugged into government-issued earphones,/ hearing hard rock,” finding echoes in the microcosmic “Slaves Among Blades of Grass”: “The Amazon ants dispatch/ Scouts armed with mandibles/ Sharp as sabers.” In this roving survey of history and nature, violence often meets beauty, but Komunyakaa never forgets how “The body remembers/ every wish one lives for or doesn’t.”

February 1, 2021
Twenty years of new and previously published poems combine to create an impressive new volume by Pulitzer Prize-winner Komunyakaa. The new work ushers the reader into the rhythmic meditations on topics that include racial violence, memory, and the duality of moments that are both ephemeral and timeless. Komunyakaa intermingles the past and present through musical language, as in "The Candlelight Lounge": ""All the little doors unlock / in the brain as the saxophone / nudges the organ & trap drums / till an echo of the Great Migration / tiptoes up & down the bass line."" In his latest poems, he also explores the through line that directly connects the spiritual with the worldly, using striking, contrasting language, as illustrated in the devastating "Shelter," which tells the story of a lynching in a small town: ""When the wind rampaged in from the east she could taste the soil, & naturally it was biblical."" These new works are followed by a solid representation of the last two decades of the poet's rich oeuvre, replete with his signature, striking, unexpected imagery and lyricism. Komunyakaa's gift for beautifully revealing the godly alongside the earthly, the realistic alongside the surreal, is superbly showcased in this well-curated and essential collection.

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March 1, 2021

Pulitzer Prize winner Komunyakaa's latest (after The Emperor of Water Clocks) offers a generous selection of poems culled from his last five collections, along with a dozen new pieces. As he has for more than four decades, the poet exercises his distinctive ability to unite past with present, the personal with the universal. Centered in the Black experience in America, Komunyakaa's vision--like Whitman's--encompasses the wide scope of humanity, from the earliest known human ancestor ("we rose from Lucy / to clan, from clan to tribe, & today / we worship her sun-polished bones / remembering she is made of questions"), to "souls laboring in sweatshops," to contemporary migrants lost at sea ("Searchlights spot the dead / hugging the living"). Komunyakaa's economical mode of expression nevertheless gives full play to the weight, depth, and musicality of his subjects, and it serves him well in poems of memory that telescope straight to the heart, which speaks like "a talking drum / under the skin." VERDICT For those unfamiliar with Komunyakaa, this volume offers a rich sampling of his postmillennial work. For his fans, it further enforces his reputation as an important and necessary American poet.--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

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