"Elaine, 1919"
from Amaud Jamaul Johnson's
Red Summer

Amaud Jamaul Johnson:

Amaud Jamaul Johnson is a native son of Compton, California. He received his BA in English from Howard University and a MPS in African American Studies from Cornell University. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and a member of the Cave Canem Workshop, he is widely published in journals and is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconson-Madison.

About Red Summer:

2004 Dorset Prize
Carl Phillips, Judge

As the first poet to win the new $10,000 Dorset Prize, Amaud Jamaul Johnson writes in Red Summer, his debut volume, of lynching, domestic abuse and love as he examines race riots that swept the United States during the summer of 1919. The poems are haunting and passionate, marked by a tender lyrical quality reminiscent of the Blues, underscored by music so unsettling it leaves the voices and names of the dead lingering in the ear. Tupelo Press entrusted to Carl Phillips the task of finding a manuscript worthy of the prize, and he has done fabulously well by all of us. These poems prey upon an appetite for spectacle, inviting, almost challenging the reader to witness the aesthetics of violence. Johnson moves between episodes of trauma and personal catastrophe to champion the elasticity of the human spirit. Beauty balances the gravity of subject, and the force of language rings true throughout this collection.

"Equally confident within the lyric and narrative modes, Johnson's Red Summer startles and impresses with its sheer range of vision, at one moment giving us a hushed, confessional poem, at another a poem of public, political consciousness. Johnson's project works like a set of concentric circles: within a history of racial atrocity on national scale lies the contemporary experience of negotiating our relationship to the history each of us has in the form of family; and even further in, there's the circle in which the self grapples with itself, its identity – not only in terms of race and gender, but also in terms of private ambition and public expectation. Johnson speaks from a space he describes at one point as 'between gravity and god' – that is, past the provable, material world, but just shy of any clear confirmation of prayer or faith – and it's a particular kind of faith that these poems at once enact and point to, what Robert Hayden called 'The deep immortal human wish, / timeless will,' the will to believe. Johnson's poems remind us that the human record is at last a mixed one: violence, shame, betrayal, and fear, but also joy, courage, love and, yes, hope. Red Summer gives us the stirring debut of a restorative new American voice."
— Carl Phillips, Judge 2004 Dorset Prize

"In this excellent first book, Amaud Johnson's poems are deeply knowing and concurrently questing, embracing the weight of histories local and beyond. The poet understands deep truths yet knows what he does not know, then seeks to know. In these poems Johnson witnesses the dark side and faces the havoc that violence wreaks. These poems are all at once wise, sober, wishful, and, to borrow a term from Robert Hayden (one of Johnson's chosen ancestors) of the 'auroral darkness.'"
— Elizabeth Alexander

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