Black Swan

by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

Overview

Winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Prize
Selected by Marilyn Nelson
Finalist, 2003 Paterson Poetry Prize

"Imagine Leda black-" begins Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon's exciting new collection of poems. Mixing vernacular language with classical mythology, modern struggles with Biblical trials, she gives voice to silenced women past and present.

In Van Clief-Stefanon's powerful voice, last night's angry words "puffed / into the dark room like steam / punching through the thick surface / of cooking grits." She remembers a child's innocence "lost / in the house where I learned the red rug / against my chest, my knees / my tongue, . . . ." Black Swan is filled with pain, loss, hope, and the promise of salvation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822957874
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	11/24/2002
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of ] Open Interval [, a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Prize, and Black Swan, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. She has been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lannan Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, and the New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts.

Table of Contents

I
	Leda	3
	199 Lee Street	4
	Home: Volusia County, Florida	5
	Eye	6
	Dinah	7
	Eight	9
	Period	10
	Daphne	11
	Roadside Stand	12
	Tamar's Blues	15
II
	Getting Saved	19
	Danae	21
	Magnificat	23
	Package	24
	Brother	28
	Europa: Daytona Beach, Florida	29
	The Daughter and the Concubine from the Nineteenth Chapter of Judges Consider and Speak Their Minds	31
	Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine	31
	But the men would not hearken to him	32
	Then came the woman in the dawning of the day	33
	And her lord rose up in the morning	34
	And he said unto her, Up, and let us be going	35
	And when he was come into his house	36
	Incubus	37
	Myth	38
	Bop: Haunting	41
III
	Groove	45
	Spring Bop: New York, 1999	46
	Hum	47
	Long Road	48
	Bop: A Whistling Woman	49
	Strip	50
	Black Swan	52
	Possession	53
	Red Whorehouse Sofa	55
	11:11 a.m.	56
	Helen	57
	Acknowledgments	59

Editorial Reviews

"A series of dramatic portraits: the landscape of a Florida landscape too hot to touch, the mother’s Pentecostal Old Testament law of judgment, a father’s recklessness in the mindless spreading of seed, male malingering with no meaningful work, and little instruction by example. . . . Ecstatic lyric, ritual grace under extreme pressure, realized."
—Michael S. Harper

From the Publisher