American Dreams

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Overview

In the tradition of Alice Walker, this electrifying new African American voice delivers the verdict on the urban condition in a sensual, propulsive, and prophetic book of poetry and prose.

Whether she is writing about an enraged teenager gone "wilding" in Central Park, fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins gunned down by a Korean grocer, or a brutalized child who grows up to escape her probable fate through the miracle of art, Sapphire's vision in this collection of poetry and prose is unswervingly honest.

"Stunning . . . . One of the strongest debut collections of the '90s."--Publishers Weekly

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More About This Book

Overview

In the tradition of Alice Walker, this electrifying new African American voice delivers the verdict on the urban condition in a sensual, propulsive, and prophetic book of poetry and prose.

Whether she is writing about an enraged teenager gone "wilding" in Central Park, fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins gunned down by a Korean grocer, or a brutalized child who grows up to escape her probable fate through the miracle of art, Sapphire's vision in this collection of poetry and prose is unswervingly honest.

"Stunning . . . . One of the strongest debut collections of the '90s."--Publishers Weekly

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
In one of the strongest debut collections of the 90s, this black lesbian feminist presents a fusion of poetry and prose, interspersed with short stories. Not for the squeamish, Sapphire's imagery is so fierce that readers will want to spread out the book over several sittings. Accounts of a young girl's rape by her father frame and inform all else, but Sapphire draws in irony as a buffer: in one extremely vivid poem, familiar phrases from the Mickey Mouse Club alternate with memories of assault. Early in her career, this writer felt the need to tell the stories of all victims (Tawana Brawley, the Central Park jogger, a nameless woman she meets on the bus), but to accomplish this she must adopt their emotional horrors as her own. ``Now that you know, / you can begin / to heal,'' the first poem ends. It is this commitment to human sensitivity that makes the terrifying exploits described here palatable. It also permits the narrator, 80 pages later, to describe the grief she feels at her mother's deathbed. Perfectly paced, sidestepping explication, Sapphire's words provide pointers to her characters' dramas, but she's still capable of stunning readers with a final image. (Feb.)
Library Journal
These riveting vignettes--some are poems, others short prose works--offer a real voice speaking on topics too often distorted by media hype: sexual abuse, prostitution, racial and sexual violence, lesbian love, and mother-daughter relations. In spite of a tendency toward cliche, the confessional pieces included here are painful and affecting; their explicit, sordid detail is utterly convincing, and the author's intelligence allows her to generalize beyond personal anger and pain. Dramatizations of such public events as the Central Park wilding incident and the Los Angeles shooting of a black teenager by a Korean American grocer, however, seem merely descriptive and sensational. This is volatile stuff, and not all of it works, but the pieces that do, go over with a bang. Recommended.-- Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780679767992
  • Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 6/28/1996
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 192
  • Sales rank: 454,261
  • Product dimensions: 5.10 (w) x 7.90 (h) x 0.49 (d)

Meet the Author

Sapphire
Sapphire
Sapphire is the author of American Dreams, a collection of poetry which was cited by Publishers Weekly as, "One of the strongest debut collections of the nineties." Push, her novel, won the Book-of-the-Month Club Stephen Crane award for First Fiction, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's First Novelist Award, and, in Great Britain, the Mind Book of the Year Award. Push was named by the Village Voice and Time Out New York as one of the top ten books of 1996. Push was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work of Fiction. About her most recent book of poetry Poet's and Writer's Magazine wrote, "With her soul on the line in each verse, her latest collection, Black Wings & Blind Angels, retains Sapphire's incendiary power to win hearts and singe minds."
 
Sapphire's work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Spin, and Bomb. In February of 2007 Arizona State University presented PUSHing Boundaries, PUSHing Art: A Symposium on the Works of Sapphire. Sapphire's work has been translated into eleven languages and has been adapted for stage in the United States and Europe. Precious, the film adaption of her novel, recently won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Awards in the U.S. dramatic competition at Sundance (2009).

Table of Contents

Are You Ready to Rock? 1
American Dreams 11
Mickey Mouse Was a Scorpio 20
in my father's house 23
boys love baseball (or a quarter buys a lot in 1952) 29
Reflections from Glass Breaking 32
Rabbit Man 34
Trilogy: one, two, three 38
A New Day for Willa Mae 53
Eat 71
Arisa 76
Violet '86 84
Autopsy Report 86-13504 90
where jimi is 101

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  • Anonymous

    Posted March 31, 2000

    powerful

    sapphire's collection of poems and short stories is a powerful collection, though the poems are much more so than her short fiction. they are intense personal experiences and by the time you finish the collection, you have a good idea of what happened to her during her life. it would be interesting to read work by her that does not relate to racial bigotry, abuse or lesbianism, but that seems to be where she is able to draw the raw energy that she writes with.

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