Sonnets for a Missing Key: and some others

by Percival Everett

Overview

Author of the instant national bestsellers, James and Erasure—the inspiration for the Oscar-winning film American Fiction—Percival Everett is diving back into poetry with his spellbinding new collection, Sonnets for a Missing Key.

Inspired by the Preludes of Chopin and the piano solos of Art Tatum, these sonnets leap and turn through philosophical musings accrued across a life well lived, with inventive language, crystalline imagery, and turns of phrase that lift off the page and glimmer. Everett’s sonnets soar through the musical scale, from A Minor to A Major, exploring relationships, spirituality, compassion, despair, and how the stories we tell ourselves shape our realities.

Everett continuously defies convention with every creative expression and brings his literary audacity back to his poetic roots with this, his sixth collection with Red Hen Press.

Sonnets for a Missing Key is a mesmerizing feat of language that reinforces Percival Everett as one of the great wordsmiths of the century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781636281667
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	08/20/2024
Pages:	64
Sales rank:	142,842
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Percival Everett is the author of fifteen novels, among them The Water Cure, Erasure, and Glyph. He is the author of the poetry collection Abstraktion und Einfühlung, the coauthor of A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid (A Novel), and provided annotations for Akashic’s publication of The Jefferson Bible. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

05/20/2024

Everett’s formally virtuosic latest collection (after The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke) interrogates the sonnet form as both a mode for thought and a vehicle for sonic inquiry and play. These sonnets resist pure logic or narrative, twisting and turning back on themselves to question their progression and temporality, as in such lines as “The thrill of it all, setting sail,/ years away, might as well deliver/ the letters ourselves upon return, icy letters/ soaked with, overwhelmed with blood.” In the first half of the collection, Everett structures his sonnets around the Italian model, seeming to relish the diagrammatic strictness of the 4-4-3-3 line stanza structure even as internal rhyme, caesura, and enjambment challenge the neatness of the form: “Tweedle Dee did what Tweedle did done,/ a dumb thing to do, it was agreed. Build a house/ of straw on Paradise Street for a pretty/ young damsel chanced for to meet.” The volume’s second half incorporates tempo instruction into its musical titles, allowing Everett to further contrast form and content, as in a poem with tempo instructions for “liveliness,” which begins with the dreary couplet “A dungeon, a pit,/ A pillow with no head.” Wry and epigrammatic, these poems inventively challenge and expand the possibilities of form. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Featured in the Shelf Unbound list of 2024 Indie Summer Reads

"Wry and epigrammatic, these poems inventively challenge and expand the possibilities of form."—Publishers Weekly

“Percival Everett is a genre.”—Kiese Laymon⁠, author of the author of Long Division and MacArthur Fellow

"I feel very deeply that he is one of the most profoundly talented writers of all time." —Robin Coste Lewis, author of Voyage of the Sable Venus and National Book Award for Poetry Winner

"Percival Everett’s body of work has been called many things—experimental, idiosyncratic, ‘gleefully unhinged’—and perhaps most frequently, prolific." —Lisa Tolin, Editorial Director at PEN America

"Everett's formally virtuosic latest collection... interrogates the sonnet form as both a mode for thought and a vehicle for sonic inquiry and play... Wry and epigrammatic, these poems inventively challenge and expand the possibilities of form." —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

07/01/2024

Everett (English, Univ. of Southern California) is best known for his novels, especially this year's James (his retelling of Twain's Huckleberry Finn as narrated by Jim) but also 2001's Erasure, which inspired the 2023 film American Fiction. But he is a considerable poet as well, with six prior collections of poems to his credit, including 2015's Trout's Lie. That said, he's not an easy poet to read. He has characterized his poetry as experimentation with "pure form" and said in a Paris Review interview that he writes poetry to prove that he can't. Abstractness mattered less in his previous collections, where his wordplay was often anchored in concrete images. But the poems in this collection, each a page or two long, seldom anchor themselves, and when they do, image and mood are distant and amorphous. These poems are inspired by Chopin preludes and Art Tatum piano solos: the 23 sonnets are named after key signatures, and the other poems refer to musical modes. But for the most part, there's not enough specificity in the poems to tie them to experience, images, mood, or music in order to make the work feel like more than a mere experiment. VERDICT For enthusiasts of Percival's writing.—David Keymer

Library Journal