Wesleyan University Press The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Lorenzo Thomas (1944-2005) was the youngest member of the Society of Umbra, predecessor of the Black Arts Movement. The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas is the first volume to encompass his entire writing life. His poetry synthesizes New York School and Black Arts aesthetics, heavily influenced by blues and jazz. In a career that spanned decades, Thomas constantly experimented with form and subject, while still writing poetry deeply rooted in the traditions of African American aesthetics. Whether drawing from his experiences during the war in Vietnam, exploring his life in the urban north and the southwest, or parodying his beloved Negritude ancestors, Thomas was a lyric innovator. Review The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education regularly publishes a list of new books that may be of interest to our readers. The books included are on a wide variety of subjects and present many different points of view.-- The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education [L]ong overdue. Thomas was born in 1944, died in 2005, and was the youngest member of Umbra, the predecessor of the Black Arts Movement. Much of his poetry was originally published in ephemeral ways, making The Collected Poems all the more welcome. These poems display Thomas's social consciousness and his place in the aesthetic tradition of his ancestors and black America.-- The Rumpus Lorenzo Thomas's Collected Poems records a lifelong commitment to the liberatory potential of Black nationalism. The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Laura Vrana, brings nearly all of Thomas's poetry to a new readership. Clocking in at more than 500 pages, the volume underscores his stylistic and thematic virtuosity, from the transformative mythic-political landscapes of The Bathers (1981), to the kaon-like minimalism of Sound Science (1992), to the introspective fierceness of Dancing on Main Street. Humorous, parodic, politically devoted, and formally experimental, Thomas's work amounts to more than four decades of writing that stood outside of both mainstream and avant-garde traditions.-- Poetry Foundation This book is a collected poems of the complex and gifted poet Lorenzo Thomas...the editors have done contemporary literature a great service by giving us all of Thomas's poetry in one big package.--William J. Harris, editor of The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader This generous tome of too-hidden genius griot-bodhisattva Lorenzo Thomas shimmers with an alert curiosity and humanity's tender blues. An important figure of second generation New York School practice as well a son of Black Arts and companion to Umbra, Thomas has never wavered in his celebration of ancestors from Pharoah Hohemreb to Leopold Senghor to Jimi Hendrix. Stir it up Thomas, writes, and he does. This Collected is a magnificent intervention of poetry's orality in a radical time he was very much a part of.--Anne Waldman, author of Trickster Feminism Lorenzo Thomas is an essential poet of postwar America. His sumptuous poetic inventiveness is grounded in searing social consciousness. Through dazzling sound patterning and the deft interplay of conflicting voices and discourses, Thomas proves the necessity of aesthetic pleasure for waking us from the slumber of complacency.--Charles Bernstein, author of Pitch of Poetry It is beautiful and amazing to have access to the vast range of invention, intensity, and surprise that Lorenzo Thomas's poetry offers. His contribution is indispensable, immeasurable and--even now, even here--unbound.--Fred Moten, author of The Little Edges About the Author Lorenzo Thomas (1944-2005), was a critic and poet, and published volumes of scholarship as well as numerous essays, including several histories of the Umbra group.   Aldon Lynn Nielsen is the author of Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation. He is the George and Barbara Kelly professor of American literature at Penn State Univer