FROM THE POET the Chicago Tribune calls the new voice of Chicago, comes L-vis Lives!, a bold new collection of poetry and prose exploring the collision of race, art, and appropriation in American culture.
L-vis is an imagined persona, a representation of artists who have used and misused Black music. Like so many others who gained fame and fortune from their sampling, L-vis is as much a sincere artist as he is a thief. In Kevin Coval's poems, L-vis' story is equal parts forgotten history, autobiography, and re-imaginings. We see shades of Elvis Presley, the Beastie Boys, and Eminem, and meet some of history's more obscure whiteboy heroes and anti-heroes: legendary breakdancers, political activists, and music impresarios.
A story of both artistic theft and radical invention, L-vis Lives! is a poetic novella on all of the possibilities and problems of post-racial American culturewhere Black art is still at times only fully accepted in a white face, and every once in a while an L-vis comes along to step in to the void.
i am a hero
to most. the great hope
of something other.
a complex back-story.
something other than
the business of my father.
bland s antonym.
jim crow s black sheep.
the forgotten son
left to rise in the darkness
among the dis
carded in the wild
of working class, single
mother hoods. a hero
who transcends
who translates the dis
satisfactions of the plains;
kids of kurt cobain,
method man amphetamine,
the odd Iowan who digs dirt
and lights beyond the pig yard,
spits nebraskan argot,
hero to the heart
land, middle brow(n) america
"
- ISBN10 1281748129
- ISBN13 9781281748126
- Publish Date 1 January 2011
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 14 April 2015
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Haymarket Books
- Format eBook
- Pages 121
- Language English