Afaa Michael Weaver is Alumnae Professor of English at Simmons College in Boston. He is the author of nine previous books of poetry including My Father's Geography and Timber and Prayer as well as short fiction and plays. He has been named a Pew Fellow in Poetry and was the first African American poet to hold the poet-in-residence position at the Stadler Poetry Center at Bucknell University.

Weaver's life studies and lyrics are imbued with a vivid sense of language, a vivid sense of the world, a vivid sense of their inseparability. And his tonal range--from unabashed passion to the subtlest velleity--is impressive indeed. This is a singular talent.-- "Henry Louis Gates Jr. on My Father's Geography"

Weaver is expanding the great tradition in American parlance and song. He strives for the deep resonance of American Grand Opera, in the Whitman tradition. [Among] his sources for inspiration are the Big Bands, his father's and mine. His poems expand the rhythm section, 'straight talk' from ancestry and remembrance. His poems are incremental revelations, his own poetic music. It is a fine rhetorical striving, undiminished.-- "Michael S. Harper on My Father's Geography"

Weaver explores and rethinks questions of identity-that great American subject. Over the years, he has listened to a chorus of other voices, the inflections of the past, as they have come together to shape and enlarge his own distinctive, musical voice. . . . He has carved a unique space for himself in contemporary American poetry.-- "Edward Hirsch on Timber and Prayer"

Weaver has crafted a virtual planet in this book with plenty of alternate geographies for readers of all flavors and stripes. Marvelous. Huge. Prodigious.-- "North American Review"

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Pub date: 2007-10-21

Length: 123 pages