Earl S. Braggs
UC Foundation and Herman H. Battle Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, is the author of Hat Dancer Blue, winner of the 1992 Anhinga Poetry Prize (selected by Marvin Bell), Walking Back from Woodstock, House on Fontanka, Crossing Tecumseh Street, In Which Language Do I Keep Silent and Younger than Neil. “After Allyson,” a chapter from his yet to be published novel, Looking for Jack Kerouac, won the 1995 Jack Kerouac Literary Prize. Other awards include Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant and a Chattanooga Allied Arts Individual Artist Grant. Supported by Summer Fellowships from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, he has traveled and written in Russia, Ukraine, France and Spain. Braggs is a native of Wilmington, North Carolina.
Braggs confronts us with a combination of hard realism and musical lyricism, painting unforgettable images in unforgettable language. This is American poetry at its finest: as spacious as Walt Whitman, as frank as the Beat Poets, and as alive with witness as the poetry of the Black Arts Movement. Braggs is a master storyteller, brings a wide range of characters and social circumstances to life on the page. Prophetic, American as the blues, Braggs’ poems take the outrages of recent history into a vision where the heart and humor, irony and vulnerability enable poet and community to survive and sometimes sing. There is breathtaking bravery and edge to the voice here, Joycean stream of consciousness that refuses to be censored or subdued.
MOVING TO NEPTUNE: NEW AND SELECTED BY EARL S. BRAGGS $22.00
Cruising Weather Wind Blue confronts us with a combination of hard realism and musical lyricism, painting unforgettable images in unforgettable language. This is American poetry at its finest: as spacious as Walt Whitman, as frank as the Beat Poets, and as alive with witness as the poetry of the Black Arts Movement. Braggs is a master storyteller, bringing a wide range of characters and social circumstances to life on the page. From the loneliness and longing of an inmate in Folsom State Prison to the hard-won practicality of Miss Carolina Brown, we find resistance and hope on the “backside of/ ugly love.” Braggs’ voice and style are unlike that of any other poet I have encountered, with rhythms that embody the raw energy of blues greats like Bessie Smith and jazz legends like Miles Davis, capturing what it means to retain one’s dignity in a world where “Sign Here________/ is a question without a mark.” These poems will stay with you long after you read them, resonating their message of our shared humanity, documenting the pain and frustration of inhabiting the world—but also the great love and resilience we find here. — Holly Karapetkova
CRUISING WEATHER WIND BLUE BY EARL S. BRAGGS $20.00
SYNTACTICAL ARRANGEMENTS OF A TWISTED WIND
BY EARL S. BRAGGS
$20.00
Earl Braggs' Syntactical Arrangements of a Twisted Wind is a prophetic work. American as the blues, these poems take the outrages of recent history into a vision where the heart and humor, irony and vulnerability enable poet and community to survive -- and sometimes sing.
There's breathtaking bravery and edge to the voice here, a Joycean stream of consciousness that refuses to be censored or subdued. This book moves our poetry in ways that only a true poet can. -- David Mura
IN WHICH LANGUAGE DO I KEEP SILENT: NEW & SELECTED POEMS
EARL SL BRAGGS
$18.00
Earl S. Braggs' poems twist and wind through cities and streets, celebrating ordinary people and historical figures alike. He is generous enough to let them live in their own telling details, without bias. Like Whitman, he finds occasions for song everywhere.It is a rich, finely textured world full of surprises and insights. In Which Language Do I Keep Silent is a rich opportunity to experience this poet in all his powers. -- James Tate
Earl S. Braggs' Crossing Tecumseh Street is lively, vocal, and laced with an intelligent sense of humor. I enjoyed these poems. --Billy Collins
WALKING BACK FROM WOODSTOCK
BY EARL S. BRAGGS
$10.00
Earl S. Braggs' Walking Back from Woodstock links the psychodramatic public [that] America put itself through in the 1960s to our privacies, our childhoods, our love lives, the music we hummed as we muddled through. His book is jaunty, heartbroken, fast-talking, and true. -- William Matthews
YOUNGER THAN NEIL
BY EARL S. BRAGGS
$20.00
Nothing changes until it's changed in everyone's memories. Earl S. Braggs remembers and records his experience, protesting America's attempt to make him smaller than these large, vivid, Kerouacian, music-saturated poems. The reader is returned, through repetition's felicities -- the epic extension of the moment of composition -- inward to our national soul. -- Alice Notley
CROSSING TECUMSEH STREET
BY EARL S. BRAGGS
$15.00
Earl S. Braggs' Crossing Tecumseh Street is lively, vocal, and laced with an intelligent sense of humor. I enjoyed these poems. I am going to share some of them with my poetry workshop which meets this afternoon. -- Billy Collins
"For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things," Rilke advises, and in Crossing Tecumseh Street, Earl Braggs does that and more as he takes us on his time machine of a book through several dozen cities and places where characters from history, literature, pop culture and fiction intersect like a maze of city streets to form a unique and visionary location.
But he doesn't stop there, where most poets would be content, for this is an important book that explores the self, and the country that too often tries to suppress the self. Powered by an incantatory rhythm in the tradition of Whitman and a lyricism in the tradition of Toomer, Braggs uses the events of history as metaphors for the self's larger visions. Playing off complex interpenetrations of presence and absence, here and there, now and then, he discovers, finally, "you walk always in the wrong direction until / you are soaked // into realizing there is no need to disappear." Both historian and prophet, Braggs takes us across Tecumseh Street into a world of dazzling visions, enormous disappointments, and guarded hopes. I don't think there's another poet today who could give us all this. -- Richard Jackson
HAT DANCER BLUE
BY EARL S. BRAGGS
$8.00
Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry (1992)
Hat Dancer Blue isn't a conventional title for a book of poetry, and neither are the poems. The writing is musical and rough, not by turns but constantly both. They breathe subject matter born of realism and an ear for stories. Here's a strong, young, black voice that applies imagination to social detail and can speak for and through others. When the external world of poetry is as richly textured and as urgent as it is for this writer, form comes from the outside in. These poems blossom out of context. Strong stuff that matters. Not the usual thing. -- Marvin Bell