Lush meditations by a poet whose previous book, Leaving Saturn, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In Hoops, Major Jackson continues to mine the solemn marvels of ordinary a grandfather gardens in a tenement backyard; a teacher unconsciously renames her black students after French painters. The substance of Jackson's art is the representation of American citizens whose heroic endurance makes them remarkable and transcendent.
Author
Major Jackson is an American poet and professor. He is the author of four collections of poetry: Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006), finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and Leaving Saturn (2002), winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Award Circle. His poems have been published in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Poetry, and Tin House. His poetry has received critical attention in The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Parnassus, Philadelphia Inquirer, and on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. His work has been included in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry 2004, The Pushcart Prize XXIX: Best of the Small Presses, Schwerkraft, From the Fishouse, and The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation. In 2013 he edited Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. [wikipedia]
