Blue Laws gathers poems written over the past two decades, drawing from all nine of my previous published books of poetry and including a number of uncollected, often unpublished, poems. These outtakes range from “Glossolalia,” written for an art catalog never realized, to “Rapture,” which first appeared in The New Yorker. I have generally left these in a rough chronology according to when they were written—or, on rare occasions, placed as part of a separate sequence such as “Homage to Phillis Wheatley”—in order to provide a sense of my process and to gather work of interest that otherwise might go by the wayside. Along the way a very few errors and awkwardnesses have been silently corrected.
In selecting these two-hundred-odd poems I have sought to include pieces regularly read aloud as well as series like “Jack Johnson” or “African Elegy” that help define the books they come from. The main exceptions to this are the book-length poems To Repel Ghosts, a “double album” and then remix about the late painter Jean-Michel Basquiat; and the epic Ardency, written over twenty years, about the Amistad rebellion. I have necessarily limited these selections dramatically. The present volume ends with a selection from the title sequence of Book of Hours, a book too recent to select from in great depth, but whose last line comes closest to an epitaph.
The title Blue Laws comes from the traditional, often unenforced laws that restrict behavior on the Sabbath, but also speaks to the blues music that informs America’s and my own.
—The Management