Double Trio is a magisterial box set of three new books, structured in part after the last three movements of John Coltrane’s Meditations: “Love,” “Consequence,” and “Serenity.” In these works, Mackey advances the tradition of the long poem, stretching the explorations and improvisations of free jazz into unprecedented poetic territory.
Nathaniel Mackey’s Late Arcade opens in Los Angeles. A musician known only as N. writes the first of a series of letters to the enigmatic Angel of Dust. N.’s jazz sextet, Molimo m’Atet, has just rehearsed a new tune: the horn players read from The Egyptian Book of the Dead with lips clothespinned shut, while the rest of the band struts and saunters in a cosmic hymn to the sun god Ra. N. ends this breathless session by sending the Angel of Dust a cassette tape of their rehearsal.
Over the next nine months, N.’s epistolary narration follows the musical goings-on of the ensemble. N. suffers from what he calls “cowrie shell at- tacks”―oil spills, N.’s memory of his mother’s melancholy musical Sundays― which all becomes the source of fresh artistic invention.
Here is the newest installment of the National Book Award-winner Nathaniel Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, the great American jazz novel of “exquisite rhythmic lyricism” (Bookforum).
Drawing inspiration and language from such spiritual traditions as Hinduism, Gnosticism, and the Dogon of Mali, Outer Pradesh is a brand new collection of poetry from American poet Nathaniel Mackey. These five poems sing the sacred and profane, blurring their definitions in moments of self-reflection and altered states of consciousness as the narrator and a revolving cast of characters travel, searching.
Nathaniel Mackey’s sixth collection of poems, Blue Fasa, continues what The New Yorker has described as the “mythological conception” and “descriptive daring” of his two intertwined serial poems—where, however, “no prior knowledge is required” for readers new to this poet’s visionary work. This collection takes its title from two related black musical traditions, a West African griot epic as told by the Fasa, a clan in ancient Ghana, and trumpeter Kenny Dorham’s hard bop classic “Blue Bossa,” influenced by the emergence of Brazilian bossa nova. In two sections Blue Fasa opens with the catch of the heart and the call of romance, as it follows a band of travelers, refugees from history, on their incessant migrations through time, place, and polity, toward renewal.
