Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black US Persona Poetry and the Archive

The early twenty-first century has seen a sharp rise in Black US poets employing the mask of persona, often including and interrogating archival materials as they do so. While some have observed this rise and noted its connection to historical figures, Ryan Sharp explores it more deeply, as a project-based historical and poetic practice. Sharp examines its sustained use of historical persona and capacity for conjuring Black speakers as a countermeasure against the archival silencing and misrepresentation of Black voices and histories—a tactic he theorizes as poetic fabulation—through the poetry of Elizabeth Alexander, Cornelius Eady, Adrian Matejka, Patricia Smith, Natasha Trethewey, and Frank X Walker. This poetic practice is not only about looking back but about critically and creatively (re)imagining the past to expand the possibilities for Black presents and futures. Through his argument, Sharp demonstrates how the unique aesthetic and rhetorical license afforded to poetry, along with the interiority of persona, empowers such historically minded projects to be concurrently invested in the curation of Black narratives and identities.

About the Author :
Ryan Sharp is assistant professor of English at Baylor University.

Review :
"A focused discussion of a literary trend in Black poetry while being equally about US history. . . . In his passionate appreciation of its chosen subject, Sharp is in constant dialogue with other critics, theoreticians, and historians. This academic study is rich for its bibliography, endnotes, and attention to the current field of literary criticism and theory. . . . Recommended."--CHOICE "Through readings of poetry that are startling in their clarity and cleverness, Sharp argues that Black writers have inhabited different kinds of poetic personas (the dead, the imagined, and even the nonhuman) to undo acts of silencing and to explore the complex relationship between Blackness and the archive. He might be the best reader of twenty-first-century Black poetry that we have." --GerShun Avilez, author of Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire "With a poet's keen control over language and impeccable academic rigor, Sharp brings a valuable addition to archives of all types: there is just as much here for scholars with interests in archival theory and social justice as there is for readers with interests in literary analysis and poetic fabulation."--The American Archivist