Thylias Moss teams up with poet Thomas Higginson. The resulting poems mix Moss's words with Higginson's in such a way that they become impossible to differentiate, creating a true literary collaboration. This is a limited edition digital chapbook.
This career-spanning volume by Thylias Moss, one of America’s most revered literary innovators, conveys the dazzling spectrum of her hypnotic poetic output, written over the past thirty-five years and including selections from each previous book as well as previously unpublished new poems.
A poet whose innovations have influenced generations of writers, Thylias Moss is a sort of taxonomist-preacher, whose profound meditation on American culture underlies and propels the dazzling lyrical and impassioned passages she writes in outraged response. This new volume gathers together substantial selections from her previous books and follows them with more than fifty pages of daring new work. Whether in early poems or more recent output, Moss make no promises of smooth sailing: even when they begin with beloved cultural icons (Robert Frost, Dr. Who, the Statue of Liberty), her poems spiral outward, insisting on new perspectives, truths, and realities―particularly of African American experience. For more than three decades, Moss has been a fearless re-inventor of poetry’s possibilities. Her New & Selected is a momentous publication by “a visionary storyteller, a major figure in contemporary American poetry” (Charles Simic).
From Thylias Moss, one of America's most innovative poets, comes Tokyo Butter, perhaps her most innovative book to date. Inventing new poetics as she goes, Moss applies her exhilarating capacity for language to a synthesis of the personal, the historical, and the cultural. She searches for vestiges of Deirdre, a beloved cousin who has left the living; for hints of Cindy Song, a college student missing since 2001; and for manifestations of her true self in the archaic wings of science. Moss' imagination is, as always, ravenous, interrogative—but in Tokyo Butter there is an urgency amidst the jagged, beautiful verse that has become her trademark.
"Thylias Moss names the black truths behind white lies. These poems are angry, defiant, yet informed with a sense of the sacred in their images, in their language, in their mimesis of transcendent ritual in everyday life. Here is a writer who speaks bitterness and makes her own music of it." —Marilyn Hacker
"A powerful blend of riveting imagery and dead-on social commentary. Moss moves skillfully back and forth between the longing for mythic and religious transformation and the reality of daily life, with its constant puncturing of hope and expectation . . . At Redbones crackles with wit and wild surmise." —Sue Standing, Boston Review
