Incognegro

Synopsis

Incognegro gathers together poems and prose drawn from journals and the author's fugitive chapbooks, along with previously unpublished pieces, around a central context of Black European and American literary-historical experience.

Incognegro is about time, loss, and memory; but also the language and experience of separation and forgetting: like other works on the Black Atlantic the book is taken up with the Middle Passage; what happens, happened, and what keeps on happening; and the something in between that drains the reality of this new world in the memory of the old.

Praise for this Book

‘D.S. Marriott’s Incognegro, “unerring as a wish returning from the land of the dead,” speaks with stark, unsettling eloquence, a book of astringent water. Elegy and lamentation alongside take-no-prisoners portent fill these beautifully mournful, beautifully acerbic poems.’ —Nathaniel Mackey

‘D.S. Marriott’s poetry moves uncannily in and out of frame – history, place and others’ recognitions. His limber lyric self ducks and dives through cuts, fades and abrupt reframing, gracefully and with perfect timing. I have wanted new poems from D.S. Marriott since Lative appeared in briefer form in 1992. Next his prose book Of Black Men revealed him as a cultural reader of the finest touch. But this is a writer who most fully knows the world through poetry, and however we frame it and however we are framed, Marriott’s poetry will draw readers with its tangible prospects and its ranging cadences of loss and recovery.’ —John Wikinson