Faster Than Light: New and Selected Poems, 1996-2011 - Hardcover

Praise for Marilyn Nelson

"Only Marilyn Nelson can take one of the most hideous events of the twentieth century and make of it something glorious.... It's a towering achievement, one whose power and anger and love will make breath catch in the throat and bring tears to the eyes." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"[Nelson's] poems are simple, sincere, and sometimes so beautiful they seem not works of artifice, but honest statements of pure, natural truths." -- School Library Journal

"A powerful achievement." -- Booklist (starred review)

"Ambitions in conception and meticulous in execution. Marilyn Nelson is a versatile poet, equally at home in free-verse monologues, narrative poems, and lyrics strictly formal or free-flowing." -- Betty Adcock, The Southern Review

"The mostly quiet music of these poems is so lovely, so compellingly lovely, that I could not help but read them aloud -- to myself, in a room in which I might have been alone except that the poems' characters, spoken, speaking, became presences there, assuming a reality that only the best poetry achieves. This is a beautiful book." -- Kelly Cherry, The Hollins Critic

Conjuring numerous voices and characters across oceans and centuries, Faster Than Light explores widely disparate experiences through the lens of traditional poetic forms. This volume contains a selection of Marilyn Nelson's new and uncollected poems as well as work from each of her lyric histories of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century African American individuals and communities.
Poems include the stories of historical figures like Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old boy lynched in 1955, and the inhabitants of Seneca Village, an African American community razed in 1857 for the creation of Central Park. "Bivouac in a Storm" tells the story of a group of young soldiers, later known as the Tuskegee Airmen, as they trained near Biloxi, Mississippi, "marching in summer heat / thick as blackstrap molasses, under trees / haunted by whippings." Later pieces range from the poet's travels in Africa, Europe, and Polynesia, to poems written in collaboration with Father Jacques de Foiard Brown, a former Benedictine monk and the subject of Nelson's playful fictional fantasy sequence, "Adventure-Monk!" Both personal and historical, these poems remain grounded in everyday details but reach toward spiritual and moral truths.