Negro Mountain (Phoenix Poets)
Description
A cross-genre poetry collection that troubles the idea of poetic voice while considering history, biology, the shamanistic, and the shapes of racial memory.
In the final section of Negro Mountain, C. S. Giscombe writes, “Negro Mountain—the summit of which is the highest point in Pennsylvania—is a default, a way among others to think about the Commonwealth.” Named for an “incident” in which a Black man was killed while fighting on the side of white enslavers against Indigenous peoples in the eighteenth century, this mountain has a shadow presence throughout this collection; it appears, often indirectly, in accounts of visions, reimaginings of geography, testimonies about the “natural” world, and speculations and observations about race, sexuality, and monstrosity. These poems address location, but Giscombe—who worked for ten years in central Pennsylvania—understands location to be a practice, the continual “action of situating.”
The book weaves through the ranges of thinking that poetic voice itself might trouble. Addressing a gallery of figures, Giscombe probes their impurities and ambivalences as a way of examining what languages “count” or “don’t count” as poetry. Here, he finds that the idea of poetry is visionary, but also investigatory and exploratory.
Praise for Negro Mountain (Phoenix Poets)
"These poems have a bardish musicality that reminds me of Nathaniel Mackey: 'there was statuary, there was / a mild nausea which, dreaming, / I’d mistaken for evil, and / also a jaguar.' Later pieces are more like essays, a combination of poetic elision and more prosaic rhetoric, block quotes and citations, gestures like 'as noted above.' The sections all comment and expand on one another, a multivocal text interrupting itself ('The mountain intervenes') with sudden shifts that unsettle and destabilize—small landslides. . . . I found it dazzling."
— New York Times, on "The Best Poetry of 2023"
"[Giscombe's] journey is captivating, sardonic, entertainingly digressive, and luminous with thought, whether stopping to ponder the Black figure in Rousseau’s painting Jaguar Attacking a Negro or spinning dream tales where he becomes a white man or 'a woman in a prison camp.' . . . The lithe veracity of his writing, it turns out, is a testament to freedom—not the 'white freedom' that he imagines in a dream, but the harder-earned cognitive liberty that comes from confronting the mystery of the journey: 'Travel’s enigmatic and we don’t have to go to Negro Mountain to see that.'"
— LitHub
"Across the book’s five sections, Giscombe uses poetry, prose blocks, and deep dives into historical records to probe issues of race, hybridity and monstrosity, and the coincidence of geography and America’s fraught racial history. Events recur and time in—and on—Negro Mountain is circuitous and looping, while memories blur into dreams and render themselves speculative and untrustworthy. . . . Negro Mountain stands as a vibrant and necessary collection showing the poet at the peak of his powers. The book builds upon Giscombe’s work in previous books—such as his 2008 Prairie Style (Dalkey Archive) and the 2014 Ohio Railroads (Omnidawn)—to explore the geography of America’s heartland and to create a collage-like portrait of the region’s fraught relationships with the concepts of Blackness and belonging."
— Colorado Review
"Through Giscombe, history speaks as a living, ongoing thread, one that attempts to work and rework bearings across an enormous sense of distance, both temporal and physical. There are dangerous shapes in those hills, some of which still work to reveal themselves, enough to cause any traveler to, through the finding, discover themselves lost."
— rob mclennan's blog
"As a poet, Giscombe is in search of big game and proceeds with due caution and foresight. He often holds us at arm’s length, interposing himself, his dreaming consciousness, and his memories between reader and subject. . . . the meaning of these dully glinting utterances in Negro Mountain may be bottomless, but Giscombe is a poet who rewards patience with cunningly mapped detours through our dislocated continent."
— Rain Taxi
“Negro Mountain traces realms of consciousness and recollection involving its namesake and presence. The weathered trail crosses thermals and paths of apexes. Buteos, maybe monsters, ever wolves and bears, dusky figures cool in the mountainside shadow of poetic accounts. Giscombe’s cadence is a ‘mountain sense’ and a methodology—a profoundly gifted range of practices surfacing love and affinity while navigating what is measureless.”
— Cecily Nicholson, author of "Harrowings"
“Negro Mountain reveals the rich layers exposed between excavating time, history, and visibility. Giscombe’s rigorously brilliant and careful book unveils its complex strata through dreams, history, and collective psyche, presenting the precarious condition of human engagement across histories of enslavement and freedom.”
— Ronaldo V. Wilson, author of "Carmelina: Figures"
“In Negro Mountain, horizontality gets its comeuppance in verticality, from the bottomless abyss of nightmarish dreams to mountains shrouded in lore and myth. In the dreamscapes of these poems, survival depends on both ‘Negro luck’ and a knack for being a bit ‘country.’ A wolf (or coyote) in sheep’s clothing, the fool on the hill is s/he who exposes ‘the story’s / sham,’ that ‘tiresome trope’ of captivity or freedom, criminality or servitude, violence or resignation. Negro Mountain turns the tables on the sacrosanct.”
— Tyrone Williams, author of "As iZ"
“Haunted by the memory of a ‘colossal’ Black man who died on Negro Mountain, Giscombe’s text returns to the eponymous landmark of an obscure historical figure. Giscombe’s itinerant poetic speakers, in their restless incarnations, have mapped territories, ridden the rails, and followed foxes. In Negro Mountain, they walk with wolves, crossing boundaries, escaping enclosure, always shape-shifting as they guide the reader through passages where the self is also the mythic other.”
— Harryette Mullen, author of Urban Tumbleweed
“A transtemporal cartography of a decidedly complex site, where ‘the devil’s in the long, long song,’ Negro Mountain rises powerfully out of the craggy terrain of race, history, and nomenclature. Dreams, locales, and a multiplicity of voices are here whispered, haunted, recorded, revealed. Poetry as dusk and interstice, prose as lucid, sinuous amalgamation: ‘The wolf is the thought.’”
— Sawako Nakayasu, author of Pink Waves
