Otherhood

by Reginald Shepherd

Written in the spaces between otherness and brotherhood, Otherhood combines traditional lyricism with experimentalism, passionate engagement with cold-eyed investigation, and personal details with a depersonalized distance to create a new poetic synthesis.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822957973
• ISBN13: 9780822957973
• Release Date: February 2003
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Otherhood

Reginald Shepherd,a prolific poet, takes the reader into a wide ride of escapades in Otherhood. In other words, he suspends you in different worlds-Elagabal, Egypt, Rome, Cygnus. More than that, his words are often shocking and uncomfortable. For instance, in his poem "Hygiene" Shepherd reminds African American men of the horrors of Jeffery Dahmer and their secret desire to sleep with white men. Finally, throughout the book Shepherd exposes himself, he reveals the naked truth. Steven C. Thedford Author Nobody Told Me It Was Like This

stunning work

It's easy to see why Bin Ramke says of Reginald Shepherd that "no poet of his generation brings more intelligence, passion, wit, and necessary madness to poetry." For my money, Shepherd is really the finest poet of his generation. In Otherhood, his fourth book in nine years, one encounters an extraordinary intellect, and a nearly flawless ear: a master of free verse whose epistemological and formal rigor enables him to write some of the most ambitious and erudite poetry I've read in years. The deep knowledge of classical literature that has informed his work since Some Are Drowning enables Shepherd to encompass the complexities of history, language and the self, leading the reader into the deeper strata of conflicting narratives that script, if invisibly, our lives. Shepherd is also a remarkably gifted observer of the natural world and of the intricate patterns of history inscribed on it over generations, as in lines like these from "Lighthouse Wreckage" (a poem that subtly alludes to, but is more complex, finally, than Arnold's "Dover Beach"): 1."Tanker run aground on shoals of disbelief,pieces of tanker everywhere, oiloverturned on television, filming white wallswith blue clouds, strangled cormorants. Off-white, 2.stained archipelago, glyph inked across saltwater stilled to stone, a myth of maps. A fragment 3.of the Roman lighthouse at Doversurvives, shudder of sedimentary rocka bluff, promise unkept...In other poems such as "Occurrences across the Chromatic Scale," Shepherd creates a paradoxical poetics, a belated and elegiac carpe diem that requires us to confront our own histories of desire. Along the way, he writes a poem worthy of Hopkins in which metrical skill allows us to see through the veil of language to the natural world:"Birds, for example, remembered fluttering torn terms, congregationsshimmer of hummingbirdsbut when does one see more than onetumbling bright flesh (skyat hand) pleating afternoon, bankingon mere atmosphere, primarycolors dividing white intothree clean halves (red, green, blue-bitter berries rasp, crabapplescrush underfoot), the spectrumsays don't stop there(smudged light a lapse of attention)there's never enough world for you"Otherhood gives us enough world.