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MACNOLIA: Poems

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ISBN-10:: 0393327647
ISBN-13:: 9780393327649
Pub. Date:: 12/17/2005
Publisher:: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.

ISBN-10:: 0393327647
ISBN-13:: 9780393327649
Pub. Date:: 12/17/2005
Publisher:: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.

MACNOLIA: Poems

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Overview

"Jordan is a wizard at capturing vernacular in both conventional forms and his own invention." —Black Issues Book Review

In 1936, teenager MacNolia Cox became the first African American finalist in the National Spelling Bee Competition. Supposedly prevented from winning, the precocious child who dreamed of becoming a doctor was changed irrevocably. Her story, told in a poignant nonlinear narrative, illustrates the power of a pivotal moment in a life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393327649
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	12/17/2005
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	1,131,793
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

A. Van Jordan is the author of five collections of poetry, including?The Cineaste, a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, and M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and a Lannan Literary Award, among other honors. He is a professor of creative writing at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, California.

	Fade In
	"Mercy, Mercy, Mercy"	15
	Z	19
	in-cho-ate	21
	John Montiere answer to question one	22
	The Moment Before He Asks MacNolia Out on a Date	23
	Meeting John Montiere	25
	Rant	26
	from	27
	Wedding Night	29
	Looking for Work	32
	Red Ball Express	34
	In Service	36
	John Montiere answer to question two	38
	Jesse Owens, 1963	39
	Infidelity	41
	When MacNolia Greases My Hair	43
	af-ter-glow	44
	John Montiere answer to question three	45
	with	46
	"One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer"	48
	Elegy to My Son	50
	I'm Trying	52
	Dust	54
	Scenes from My Scrapbook	56
	This Life	58
	The Night Richard Pryor Met Mudbone	60
	Death Letter Blues Ghazal	66
	Unforgettable	68
	A	73
	English	75
	to	80
	Rope	82
	Time Reviews The Ziegfeld Follies Featuring Josephine Baker, 1936	83
	Morena	87
	Asa Philip Randolph	89
	Green Pastures	92
	Practice	93
	Akron Spelling Bee, April 22, 1936	96
	On Stage	100
	MacNolia Backstage with Fats Waller And Bill Robinson at the RKO Palace Theater	104
	My Dream of Charon	108
	Details Torn from MacNolia's Diary	109
	National Spelling Bee Championship Montage	112
	N-e-m-e-s-i-s Blues	118
	In Allan Rohan Crite's School's Out	119
	My One White Friend	120
	Covering the Spelling Bee	121
	Fin	127
	MacNolia's Dream of Shirley Temple
	Fade Out	133
	Acknowledgments

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

The first African-American student to reach the final round of the National Spelling Bee, 13-year-old MacNolia Cox of Akron, Ohio, found short-lived celebrity in 1936; when she died 40 years later, the girl who "was almost/ The national spelling champ" had become a cleaning woman, a grandmother, and "the best damn maid in town." Cox's ambition and her later frustration find incisive shape in this remarkably varied meditation on ambition, racism, discouragement and ennui, where successive pages can bring to mind a handbook of poetic forms (a double sestina, Japanese-inspired syllabics, a blues ghazal and prose poems based on definitions of prepositions), Ann Carson's "TV Men" poems, Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah and the documentary film Spellbound. Jordan (Rise) begins in Cox's later life, giving voice to her husband, John Montiere, at "The Moment Before He Asks MacNolia Out on a Date," then to MacNolia herself when in 1970 her son dies just after his return from Vietnam. As counterpoints, Jordan intersperses poems about African-Americans who won more lasting public acclaim, among them Richard Pryor, Josephine Baker and the great labor organizer and orator A. Philip Randolph. Jordan's most quotable poems, however, return to the voice of the 13-year-old speller, who "learned the word chiaroscuro/ By rolling it on my tongue// Like cotton candy the color/ Of day and night." (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

"Men/ don't need no big words to beg," Jordan (Rise) concludes one of the shortest but most powerful poems in his second collection. He's writing in the voice of MacNolia Cox, a 13-year-old Negro who won the Ohio spelling bee in 1936 and went on to compete nationally. Suddenly faced with the realization that no little girl her color will ever win, she still can't prove they cheated when "They pulled a word not on the list,/ the goddess of vengeance: Nemesis-N-e-m-e-s-i-s-I couldn't spell it, then." Prefaced by her obituary, the book picks up her life from when she first met her husband. We see the lovers, then move quickly to the broken woman cleaning houses, the broken man who can't find work. There are cameo appearances by Jesse Owens, Fats Waller, Richard Pryor, Josephine Baker, and Bojangles and quotes or mock-quotes from arts reviews and newspaper articles of the time. Multivoiced and multifaceted, the poems and prose here play on the book's premise, spelling out words and giving definitions. Unfortunately, the other voices aren't as powerful as MacNolia's and serve more as cogs to move the narrative along. Still, this book captures an important figure who has been too long obscure, and at its best the poems are both memorable and haunting.-Rochelle Ratner, formerly with Soho Weekly News, New York Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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MACNOLIA: Poems

MACNOLIA: Poems

Paperback

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Overview

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About the Author

Table of Contents

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