| FROM THE POET the Chicago Tribune calls the new voice of Chicago, comes L-vis Lives!, a bold new collection of poetry and prose exploring the collision of race, art, and appropriation in American culture.L-vis is an imagined persona, a representation of artists who have used and misused Black music. Like so many others who gained fame and fortune from their sampling, L-vis is as much a sincere artist as he is a thief. In Kevin Coval's poems, L-vis' story is equal parts forgotten history, autobiography, and re-imaginings. We see shades of Elvis Presley, the Beastie Boys, and Eminem, and meet some of history's more obscure whiteboy heroes and anti-heroes: legendary breakdancers, political activists, and music impresarios.A story of both artistic theft and radical invention, L-vis Lives! is a poetic novella on all of the possibilities and problems of post-racial American culturewhere Black art is still at times only fully accepted in a white face, and every once in a while an L-vis comes along to step in to the void.i am a heroto most. the great hopeof something other.a complex back-story.something other thanthe business of my father.blands antonym.jim crows black sheep.the forgotten sonleft to rise in the darknessamong the discarded in the wildof working class, singlemother hoods. a herowho transcendswho translates the dissatisfactions of the plains,kids of kurt cobain,method man amphetamine,the odd Iowan who digs dirtand lights beyond the pig yard,spits nebraskan argot,hero to the heartland, middle brow(n) america |
