Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh

0/5 ( ratings)

With an introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa

Included in the 2014 Over the Rainbow list

"A profound compassion for racial and sexual minorities, the oppressed, and the colonized, informs [Glave’s] searing, beautifully evocative collection of essays...He captures the languor and seductiveness of Jamaica...A graceful and original stylist, Glave highlights the marginalized—calling on the descendants of people who toiled for the Empire as slaves and colonial subjects to never forget their past, and, in effect, to those who profit from that past to acknowledge their complicity. Ultimately, his work is critical, yet filled with generosity and compassion."
--Publishers Weekly, starred review

Best Book of 2013 selection, The Airship/Black Balloon Publishing

"Thomas Glave surely is one of the bravest of contemporary authors…He is a fearless truth-teller whose essays in Among the Bloodpeople are fully, unhesitatingly engaged with his and our world."
--New York Journal of Books

"This collection is wide-ranging, moving from the Caribbean to Cambridge, England, and from poetry to sex to discrimination."
--Library Journal, BEA Editors' Picks feature

"A sensitive, sharp set of intelligences--intellectual, to be sure, but prevailingly emotional, too--reside in the makeup of these essays...these pieces are moulded in resistance, bolstered by history, suffused in poetry: each of them is a delight."
--Paper Based Bookshop blog

"I didn’t know [homosexuals in Jamaica] were disemboweled with machetes. And I didn’t consider one could be poetic about fear and anger and isolation. But the touchingly phrased sentences don’t soften the impact of reading about murder and political corruption. Instead, it eats at you because it makes you attentive to every word, feel the pauses as Glave takes a breath and speaks with the pulse of his heartbeat."
--Reeling and Writhing and Fainting in Coils

“Glave’s prose is a thing of poetry, passion, beauty, and clarity in its compelling appeal for the space of human love and tolerance. A joy to read.”
--Ngugi wa Thiong’o, author of Dreams in a Time of War

"Glave's voice resonates in the plucked string holding each sentence together, an echo of James Baldwin and Jean Genet; his language carries the full freight of witness . . . His language is seductive and regenerative, critical and humanizing, almost mathematically gauged and encompassing, and it never fails to hold us accountable. But alongside the terror we witness, moments of sheer beauty seethe out of the landscape—not as a balm, but as needful epistles of reflection . . . Glave has done a heroic deed.”
--Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Neon Vernacular

"Glave is a gifted stylist . . . blessed with ambition, his own voice, and an impressive willingness to dissect how individuals actually think and behave."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Glave's literary temperament has been described as 'Faulknerian,' and the comparison speaks volumes. He achieves astonishing tonal effects . . . [and] has a poet's way with words."
--The Washington Post

Thomas Glave has been admired for his unique style and exploration of taboo, politically volatile topics. The award-winning author's new collection, Among the Bloodpeople, contains all the power and daring of his earlier writing but ventures even further into the political, the personal, and the secret.

Each essay in the volume reveals a passionate commitment to social justice and human truth. Whether confronting Jamaica's prime minister on antigay bigotry, contemplating the risks and seductions of "outlawed" sex, exploring a world of octopuses and men performing somersaults in the Caribbean Sea, or challenging repressive tactics employed at the University of Cambridge, Glave expresses the observations of a global citizen with the voice of a poet.