EBOOK
About
Mr. West covers the main events in superstar Kanye West's life while also following the poet on her year spent researching, writing, and pregnant. The book explores how we are drawn to celebrities-to their portrayal in the media-and how we sometimes find great private meaning in another person's public story, even across lines of gender and race. Blake's aesthetics take her work from prose poems to lineated free verse to tightly wound lyrics to improbably successful sestinas. The poems fully engage pop culture as a strange, complicated presence that is revealing of America itself. This is a daring debut collection and a groundbreaking work.
Related Subjects
Reviews
"In Blake's collection of lyric meditations, the blend of her own personal threads against Kanye's public self are intriguing, and her pop culture commentaries allow the distraction against her being able to dig further into what, at times, becomes a deeply personal and revealing work."
Rob McLennan
"As a work of literary nonfiction, the book conflates the life of the poet-who began the 46-poem cycle while she was pregnant and living in Havertown, PA-with the controversial superstar rapper."
Peter Crimmins
"In Mr. West, the complicated relationships between poet and artist, poet and legacy, poet and source material, artist and legacy, and any permutations thereof create a new kind of modern myth-the kind that, even though it may be a fabrication, can actually have personal meaning."
Douglas Luman
Extended Details
- SeriesWesleyan Poetry