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Masked Man, Black

Frank X Walker


We are proud to bring to you Masked Man, Black by iconic poet Frank X Walker, the author of two other Accents Publishing books: Last Will, Last Testament and About Flight. The poems in this new collection pack the immediacy and gravity of letters from the trenches of a war. What is at stake here is our humanity, dignity, way of life, our relationship to the truth. Read this book, let's have a conversation.

What Others Say About Masked Man, Black

Professor Frank X Walker has yet again used his superpowers to insert a conscience into the tumultuous cacophony that is social media. His latest series of poems debuted in our news feeds, week after week, speaking truth to the tangled web of perspectives splattered across our digital landscape. By spreading light in our darkest times, our Professor X speaks to a class of students, who have been mutated by the pandemic, by political doublespeak and visions of violence and brutality from around the world. With each new line of poetry, Our Professor X reads our minds and speaks to our hearts. Catharsis and metamorphosis are experienced simultaneously for the reader. Thank you for sharing your words.

—Willard C. Watson III

We all wear masks. There are people with whom we can take our masks off and speak from the heart. Professor Walker is an expert in masks, or personas. And he well knows that sometimes masks let us speak deep truths about the world. He also knows masks sometimes protect us, sometimes keep us from ourselves, and sometimes cause us pain. Paul Dunbar, in "We Wear the Mask," asks of the world and of poetry, "Why should the world be over-wise, / In counting all our tears and sighs?" Yet, it seems that now, as then, the world pays too little attention to the tears and sighs about which Dunbar sings. We are so grateful that Walker has taken the time to sit with death and pain and heartbreak, to sit and tune his voice to sing these elegies, so that we can gather around him to sing through our tears with head held high.

—Jeremy Paden

Sometimes poignant and moving, other times raw and gutting, Walker's pandemic and protest poems provide a ballast to the widespread sensation of being at sea. Their immediacy helps us to digest the inexplicable chaos all around, grappling in real time with loss, pain, tragedy, horror, madness, and death—from systemic American racism, inextricably linked to systemic healthcare inequities. Greeting us each morning during the Covid-inflected version of National Poetry Month in April, and continuing into the belly of Black Lives Matters protests in May and June, Walker's daily offerings calm us, inflame us, inspire us, and offer up a clarifying lens through which to examine the world anew. Now polished and collected into this volume, they continue to sustain us as we move forward into an uncertain world.

—Kris Yohe


 

Masked Man, Black

after Paul Laurence Dunbar

Black male me           walks into a store
in broad daylight      black phone in hand
wearing a black mask.

You already know how this         ends.
Somebody felt threatened.
Somebody got shot.
Black woman wailing makes news.

But it isn't new.
All the chalk outlines are white.
All the states are red.
The Coronavirus doesn't discriminate.
Racists still do.

Peel off mask          no grins        no lies.


 

Mrs. Butterworth, Uncle Ben & Aunt Jemima

...walk into a bar in America.
Butterworth says, I'm being repackaged.
Ben says, I'm being rebranded.
Jemima says, I remember
when they branded my mama    on her back.

The bartender says, I could stand in the middle
of Main Street and kill somebody
and I wouldn't lose any voters.
Butterworth says, then I'll take eight bullets
in my sleep. Ben says choke me to death
with your knee. Jemima says,
lock me in a holding cell and say
I decided to hang myself.

The bartender poured the drinks,
said he felt threatened
and was simply standing his ground
when he thought the thug
was reaching for a gun.

The headlines said Well-Loved American
Foods Resisted Arrest, Failed
to Comply, and Were Delicious While Black.

Butterworth's daughter said here's to progress,
we might finally get an anti-lynching bill.
Ben's son said I'd rather they abolish
qualified immunity. Jemima's kid said you know
they abolished slavery once,
then they hung my mama      on that box.


 
Details and Ordering

Publication Date: October 15, 2020
Format: Softcover, 6" x 9"
ISBN: 978-1-936628-59-9
Price: $16.00


A Note to Educators

Click the link to download a discussion guide, designed for high school students but adaptable for lower grades, to help to facilitate a study of Frank X Walker's Masked Man, Black: Pandemic & Protest Poems and ultimately demonstrate that literature, and the arts in general, can help us make sense of our times. The guide will introduce literary terms/poetic devices, allow students to analyze poems in order to locate the poetic devices at work, and encourage students to make a personal connection to their world and experience.

Please write to accents.publishing@gmail.com for information about discounts on classroom sets of books.

About the Author

A native of Danville, Kentucky, Frank X Walker is the first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate. Walker has published ten collections of poetry, including Last Will, Last Testament, winner of the 2020 Judy Gaines Young Book Award, Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which was awarded the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the Black Caucus American Library Association Honor Award for Poetry. He is also the author of Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York, winner of the 2004 Lillian Smith Book Award, and Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride, which he adapted for stage, earning him the Paul Green Foundation Playwrights Fellowship Award. His poetry was also dramatized for the Contemporary American Theater Festival and staged by Message Theater. Voted one of the most creative professors in the south, Walker coined the term "Affrilachia" and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets, subsequently publishing the much-celebrated eponymous collection. His honors also include a 2004 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, the 2008 and 2009 Denny C. Plattner Award for Outstanding Poetry in Appalachian Heritage, the 2013 West Virginia Humanities Council's Appalachian Heritage Award, the 2020 Donald Justice Poetry Award, as well as fellowships and residences with Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Kentucky Arts Council. The recipient of honorary doctorates from University of Kentucky, Transylvania University, Spalding University and Centre College, Walker is the founding editor of pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, Professor of English and African American and Africana Studies, and Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

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