Margins
Djbot Baghostus's Run book cover
Djbot Baghostus's Run
1993
First Published
4.53
Average Rating
208
Number of Pages

Part of Series

Djbot Baghosthus' Run is the second volume of Mackey's ongoing epistolary fiction, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Like the first volume, Bedouin Hornbook, this work is written by the composer/multi-instrumentalist N., a founding member of a jazz group known as the Mystic Horn Society. Djbot Baghosthus' Run is centered, in part, on the band's search for a new drummer. But this search, which begins with a revolution among the women of the group, and ends in a series of remarkable coincidences and eerie transcendental experiences, is also a search for everything that art (music and writing in this case) is and serves as an emblem for. Each letter spans an extraordinary range of voices and discourses, from philosophical to folkloric to erotic - with music always the connecting thread. Jazz for Mackey clearly is a cosmological and spiritual experience, on which signifies all those possibilities that lie beyond N.'s improvisations of a saxophone riff. At every level, intellectual, spiritual, sexual, and just plain gut, Djbot Baghosthus' Run is a masterwork of contemporary storytelling, a wonder that will haunt the emotions and arouse the intellect.

Avg Rating
4.53
Number of Ratings
38
5 STARS
63%
4 STARS
29%
3 STARS
5%
2 STARS
3%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads

Author

Nathaniel Mackey
Nathaniel Mackey
Author · 15 books

Poet and novelist Nathaniel Mackey was born in 1947 in Miami, Florida. He received a BA degree from Princeton University and a PhD from Stanford University. Nathaniel Mackey has received numerous awards including a Whiting Writer’s Award and a 2010 Guggenheim fellowship. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of English at Duke University and served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. Mackey currently lives in Durham, North Carolina.

548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2025 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved