This book is bold, brave, and morally messy—twelve rounds of knock-down, drag-out shadowboxing against a shapeshifter. The dark humor, intellectual fervor, and emotional rigor Coval brings to bear animates these pieces, turns caricatures to characters, implicates us all. It’s about time.”
—Adam Mansbach, author, Go the F**k to Sleep
"As insane as it may seem, much writing about Hip-Hop, especially about White kids and Hip-Hop, eschews the discussion of race or racism. L-vis Lives! is a book of poetry that honestly, beautifully, and emotionally illustrates the contours of that discussion. And it reads like heavily syruped pancakes."
—Boots Riley
"The figure of the White Boy at the center of L-vis Lives! is a beast of line-beat-breaks, an ambitious and naive thief, equally loved and dissed in his unattainable odyssey for black cultural props. Kevin Coval rips the black skin off of hip Whiteness. Part Norman Mailer's White Negro (“urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts”) and part social aesthetic-activist (but branded a terrorist) determined to continue the Unfinished, Collected Works of John Brown. Real or imagined, as a poet, this White Boy operates in a complex, Contemporary Confessional mode which means he is a snitch, one who straddles the line between escapism and cultural betrayal, a poet who tells bravely and honestly on the self even as he is being haunted by the inheritance of the swinging hips of a legend. Kevin Coval may not have wanted to but he has proven, at a time when many poets use metaphor and restraint to tiptoe around the tough issues of identity and borrowed race, that most L-vises (especially the ones falsely hardened by their own often rejected love of Hip Hop) have Soul."
—Thomas Sayers Ellis, author, Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems
Kevin Coval’s L-vis Lives! is an unstinting excavation of race and culture, art and ownership. It offers poetic affirmation of Ralph Ellison’s signal insight, made forty years ago, that “whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black.” Though some, either out of optimism or of ignorance, have dubbed our nation ‘post-racial,’ Coval reminds us that America is a country in which race is always receding from but ever returning to the center of our consciousness. With poignancy, humor, raw insight, and no small amount of soul, Coval has fashioned a poetry for the present. His voice demands our attention.
—Adam Bradley, co-editor, The Anthology of Rap
“This is a relentless book, brave and uncomfortable. Nothing like it has ever been written. No one really talks about these white men of color. No one considers their origins or the source of their craving. No one has bothered to label this pursuit of Blackness a meaningful tribute or a persistent dysfunction. L-vis Lives! is a cultural touchstone, a book that will easily move into a space that’s been waiting for much too long.”
—Patricia Smith, author, Blood Dazzler, finalist for the National Book Award
“Kevin Coval, Chicago bard, inspired teacher, and Pied Piper of poetry to a generation of hip-hop urban guerrillas, does with L-vis Lives what good art demands: I was in orbit.”
—Bill Ayers, author, Fugitive Days
“Kevin Coval's poetic novella teaches us the traps of life, allowing us to love our reflections, filling us with the joy to live, to struggle for life. The world is ours.”
—Vijay Prishad, author, The Darker Nations
"Tough and smart, real and surreal, aching and funny, in-the-tradition and startlingly original, the trials of L-vis show us the challenges of giving up on whiteness—a process at once monumentally hard, too easy, and absolutely necessary."
—David Roediger, author, How Race Survived U.S. History
Praise for Kevin Coval
"Kevin Coval is a new, glowing voice in the world of literature. He writes— indeed, speaks, for it is his voice we hear singing. It is a bleak and dangerous time for all mankind. And yet, we shall, despite horrendous evidence, prevail and survive—and hopefully, grow as we glow on hearing his eloquent tribute to our species. In Kevin Coval’s voice is our hope for a new world of peace, grace and beauty.”
—Studs Terkel
“One of my favorite poets.”
—Mos Def
“At turns lyrical and fierce.”
— The Onion
"A prophet…a tour-de-force…he can soothe and scathe, hurt and heal, in the course of a single poem."
— Providence Journal
"Coval echoes Ginsberg in his spiritual revolt and longing for multicultural transcendance. Funny and empathic…his well-stocked poems contain earth and spirit, body and soul."
— Booklist
"Coval’s greatest strength is his rhythmic, beautiful prose and his willingness to speak truth to power, no matter what the personal cost."
— URB
"A concious Jewish phenomenon…[Coval’s] work speaks to the Jewish relationship to the American color line."
—Jew School
