Review
Signifying soundtrack
Lambda Book Report, Vol.13(9-10), pp.22-23
04/01/2005
Abstract
With Drag, poet and performer Duriel E. Harris sets the language-identity connection to music and against the body. There is a kind of marathon two-step under way here, as if in a mirrored ballroom. Self and non-self, speech and the unspoken signify and improvise on the word "drag." A hassle. A pulling through thick substance, as in death, a dirge. A belly-rub, or avoidance. A performance, or a mark, which is also history. Drag's notational prologue of slashes and dashes, and fluid lines on sheet music paper, signals readers to abandon conventional expectations and to instead imagine the sounds of the marks throughout the book, both the familiar and those made strange. These improvisations on "drag" occur in five "movements" that organize the poems into a varied investigation of the visible, sexualized, remembered, scored or celebrated figure. An elegiac, self-reflexive tone carries the first poems in the movement, as in "Living Body,"
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Signifying soundtrack
- Creators
- Tisa Bryant
- Resource Type
- Review
- Publication Details
- Lambda Book Report, Vol.13(9-10), pp.22-23
- Publisher
- Lambda Literary Foundation
- ISSN
- 1048-9487
- eISSN
- 1931-132X
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 04/01/2005
- Description audience
- General
- Academic Unit
- English
- Record Identifier
- 9984637882902771
Metrics
1 Record Views