Poems deal with prophecy, music, magic, initiation, mythology, dreams, dance, secrets, death, and time

ERODING WITNESS (National Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

MacKey, Nathaniel

Poetry

University of Illinois Press

Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (Contemporary North American Poetry)

Paracritical Hinge is a collection of varied yet interrelated pieces highlighting Nathaniel Mackey’s multifaceted work as writer and critic. It embraces topics ranging from Walt Whitman’s interest in phrenology to the marginalization of African American experiential writing; from Kamau Brathwaite’s "calibanistic" language practices to García Lorca’s flamenco aesthetic of duende and its continuing repercussions; from H.D.’s desert measure and coastal way of knowing to the altered spatial disposition of Miles Davis’s trumpet sound; from Robert Duncan’s Vietnam War poetry to the emancipatory potential of collaborative practices; from serial poetics to diasporic syncretism; from the lyric poem’s present-day predicaments to gnosticism. Offering illuminating commentary on these and other artists including Amiri Baraka, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Wilson Harris, Jack Spicer, John Coltrane, Jay Wright, and Bob Kaufman, Paracritical Hinge also sheds light on Mackey’s own work as a poet, fiction writer, and editor.

United States

University of Wisconsin Press

Paracritical Hinge is a collection of varied yet interrelated pieces highlighting Nathaniel Mackey’s multifaceted work as writer and critic. It embraces topics ranging from Walt Whitman’s interest in phrenology to the marginalization of African American experiential writing; from Kamau Brathwaite’s "calibanistic" language practices to García Lorca’s flamenco aesthetic of duende and its continuing repercussions; from H.D.’s desert measure and coastal way of knowing to the altered spatial disposition of Miles Davis’s trumpet sound; from Robert Duncan’s Vietnam War poetry to the emancipatory potential of collaborative practices; from serial poetics to diasporic syncretism; from the lyric poem’s present-day predicaments to gnosticism. Offering illuminating commentary on these and other artists including Amiri Baraka, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Wilson Harris, Jack Spicer, John Coltrane, Jay Wright, and Bob Kaufman, Paracritical Hinge also sheds light on Mackey’s own work as a poet, fiction writer, and editor.

History & Criticism

Discrepant Engagement addresses work by a number of authors not normally grouped under a common rubric--black writers from the United States and the Caribbean and the so-called Black Mountain poets. Nathaniel Mackey examines the ways in which the experimental aspects of their work advance a critique of the assumptions underlying conventional perceptions and practice. Arguing that the work of these writers engages the discrepancy between presumed norms and qualities of experience such norms fail to accommodate, Mackey highlights their valorization of dissonance, divergence and formal disruption. He advances a cross-cultural mix that is uncommon in studies of experimental writing, frequently bringing the works and ideas of the authors it addresses into dialogue and juxtaposition with one another, insisting that parallels, counterpoint and relevance to one another exist among writers otherwise separated by ethnic and regional boundaries.

Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality and Experimental Writing (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Series Number 71)

Travel

Cambridge University Press

Discrepant Engagement addresses work by a number of authors not normally grouped under a common rubric--black writers from the United States and the Caribbean and the so-called Black Mountain poets. Nathaniel Mackey examines the ways in which the experimental aspects of their work advance a critique of the assumptions underlying conventional perceptions and practice. Arguing that the work of these writers engages the discrepancy between presumed norms and qualities of experience such norms fail to accommodate, Mackey highlights their valorization of dissonance, divergence and formal disruption. He advances a cross-cultural mix that is uncommon in studies of experimental writing, frequently bringing the works and ideas of the authors it addresses into dialogue and juxtaposition with one another, insisting that parallels, counterpoint and relevance to one another exist among writers otherwise separated by ethnic and regional boundaries.

In a stunning new collection of poems of transport and transcendence, African-American poet Nathaniel Mackey's "asthmatic song of aspiration" scuttles across cultures and histories―from America to Andalucía, from Ethiopia to Vienna―in a sexy, beautiful adaptive dance. Part antiphonal rant, part rhythmic whisper, Nathaniel Mackey's new collection of poems, Splay Anthem, takes the reader to uncharted poetic spaces. Divided into three sections―"Braid," "Fray," and "Nub" (one referent Mackey notes in his stellar Introduction: "the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become, the shrunken place the earth has become, planet Nub")―Splay Anthem weaves together two ongoing serial poems Mackey has been writing for over twenty years, "Song of the Andoumboulou" and "Mu" (though "Mu no more itself / than Andoumboulou"). In the cosmology of the Dogon of West Africa, the Andoumboulou are progenitor spirits, and the song of the Andoumboulou is a song addressed to the spirits, a funeral song, a song of rebirth. "Mu," too, splays with meaning: muni bird, Greek muthos, a Sun Ra tune, a continent once thought to have existed in the Pacific. With the vibrancy of a Mira painting, Mackey's poems trace the lost tribe of "we" through waking and dreamtime, through a multitude of geographies, cultures, histories, and musical traditions, as poetry here serves as the intersection of everything, myth's music, spirit lift.

Splay Anthem

New Directions

The great American jazz novel of “such exquisite rhythmic lyricism” (Bookforum) by National Book Award Winner Nathaniel Mackey.From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate: Volumes 1-3 collects the first three installments―Bedouin Hornbook, Djbot Baghostus’s Run, and Atet A.D.―of Nathaniel Mackey’s genre-defying work of fiction. A project that began over thirty years ago, From a Broken Bottle is an epistolary novel that unfolds through N.’s intricate letters to the mysterious Angel of Dust. Unexpected, profound happenings take place as N. delves into music and art and the goings-on of his transmorphic Los Angeles-based jazz ensemble, in which he is a composer and instrumentalist. This triple-set book opens in July 1978 with a dream of a haunting Archie Shepp solo, and closes in September 1982 in a parallactic studio recording session on a glass-bottomed boat borne aloft by the music. The fourth volume of Mackey’s novel, Bass Cathedral―also available from New Directions―was chosen by The New York Times as one of 100 Notable Books of 2008. But that it didn’t end there…

From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate: Bedouin Hornbook, Djbot Baghostus's Run, Atet A.D.

A stellar new collection of poems by “the Balanchine of the architecture dance” (The New York Times) and winner of the 2006 National Book Award in poetry. With Nathaniel Mackey’s fifth collection of poems, Nod House, we witness a confluence of music and meaning unprecedented in American poetry. Mackey’s art continues to push the envelope of what is possible to map and remap through words in sounds and sounds in words. Picking up with Nub’s disintegration at the end of his previous collection ― the National Book Award–winning Splay Anthem ― we follow a traveler and a tribe of travelers ensconced in myth and history as Mackey continues to weave his precisely measured music with two ongoing serial poems, Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu. The collec- tion is divided into two sections, both titled “Quag,” and it is this double-Quag (“Nub’s new colony Quag” or Qraq or Ouab’da or Quaph . . .) that the tribe is exiled in, worlds within alternate worlds where names and places are ever-shifting, and dreamlessness reigns. From the pyramids to the projects, Ivory Coast to Lone Coast, Lagos to Stick City, amidst chorusing horns and star-spar lightning, Nod House (“Nub’s / new / address”) unfolds as gorgeous eulogy, copla-cuts of deep song, the long elegiac march of “day after day of the dead.”

Nod House (New Directions Paperbook)

A stellar new collection of poems by “the Balanchine of the architecture dance” (The New York Times), and winner of the National Book Award in poetry. Nathaniel Mackey’s sixth collection of poems, Blue Fasa, carries forward what the New Yorker has described as the “mythological conception” and “descriptive daring” of his two intertwined serial poems. A long song that's one and more than one, this collection takes its title from two related black musical traditions, a West African griot epic as told by the Fasa, a clan in ancient Ghana, and trumpeter Kenny Dorham’s hard bop classic “Blue Bossa,” influenced by the emergence of Brazilian bossa nova. The book opens with the catch of the heart and the call of romance, as it follows a band of travelers, refugees from history, on their incessant migrations through time, place, and polity toward a truer sense of being and belonging.

Blue Fasa

A new volume of the singular, ongoing, great American jazz novel 
Nathaniel Mackey’s Late Arcade opens in Los Angeles. A musician known only as N. writes the first of a series of letters to the enigmatic Angel of Dust. N.’s jazz sextet, Molimo m’Atet, has just rehearsed a new tune: the horn players read from The Egyptian Book of the Dead with lips clothespinned shut, while the rest of the band struts and saunters in a cosmic hymn to the sun god Ra. N. ends this breathless session by sending the Angel of Dust a cassette tape of their rehearsal.
Over the next nine months, N.’s epistolary narration follows the musical goings-on of the ensemble. N. suffers from what he calls “cowrie shell at- tacks”―oil spills, N.’s memory of his mother’s melancholy musical Sundays― which all becomes the source of fresh artistic invention.
Here is the newest installment of the National Book Award-winner Nathaniel Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, the great American jazz novel of “exquisite rhythmic lyricism” (Bookforum).

Late Arcade

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MacKey, Nathaniel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by MacKey, Nathaniel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MacKey, Nathaniel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

ERODING WITNESS (National Poetry Series)

Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (Contemporary North American Poetry)

Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (Contemporary North American Poetry)

Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality and Experimental Writing (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Series Number 71)

Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality and Experimental Writing (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Series Number 71)

Splay Anthem

From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate: Bedouin Hornbook, Djbot Baghostus's Run, Atet A.D.

Nod House (New Directions Paperbook)

Blue Fasa

Late Arcade