For thirty-five years American poet Nathaniel Mackey has been writing a long poem of fugitive making like no other: two elegiac, intertwined serial poems--"Song of the Andoumboulou" and "Mu"--that follow a mysterious, migrant "we" through the rhythms and currents of the world with lyrical virtuosity and impassioned expectancy.
In a note to this astonishing box set of new work, Mackey writes: "I turned sixty-five within a couple of months of beginning to write Double Trio and I was within a couple of months of turning seventy-one when I finished it.... It was a period of distress and precarity inside and outside both. During this period, a certain disposition or dispensation came upon me that I would characterize or sum up with the words all day music. It was a period during which I wanted never not to be thinking between poetry and music, poetry and the daily or the everyday, the everyday and the alter-everyday. Philosophically and technically, the work meant to be always pertaining to the relation of parts to one another and of parts to an evolving whole."
Structured in part after the last three movements of John Coltrane's Meditations--"Love," "Consequence," and "Serenity"--Double Trio stretches the explorations and improvisations of free jazz into unprecedented poetic territory.
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Trim Size - 6x9
Page Count - 1080
Hardback - 3 books
Still sourcing and exploring two massive, braided streams of retrospective invention—‘Mu’ and Song of the Andoumboulou—Mackey’s liturgy falls and sprays and pools in Double Trio. Bottomless, modal, modular as McCoy Tyner’s matched, augmented threes, surfaces bloomed with turbulent, recombinant bottom like Bill Dixon’s double-bassed ensembles, Double Trio doesn’t culminate: it promises.—Fred Moten
Three new books in a spectacular limited edition box carry the tradition of the long poem far into the 21st century with a “low-lit, slow-drag ebullience”
Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida, in 1947, and grew up, from age four, in California. He received a B.A. from Princeton University in 1969 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1975. He is the author of thirteen chapbooks of poetry, 6 books of poetry, and the five-volume work of fiction From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. He is also the author of two books of criticism, Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (University of Iowa Press, 2018) the most recent. Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25, a compact disc recording of poems read with musical accompaniment (Royal Hartigan, percussion; Hafez Modirzadeh, reeds and flutes), was released in 1995 by Spoken Engine Company; Stray: A Graphic Tone, a vinyl LP of poetry and commentary, was released by Fonograf Editions/ROMA Publications in 2019; Fugitive Equation, a double-CD collaborative performance with The Creaking Breeze Ensemble, was released by Creaking Breeze in 2019. He is the editor of the literary magazine Hambone, a coeditor, with Art Lange, of the anthology Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993), and a coeditor, with Michael Bough, Kent Johnson and others, of the anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017). His honors include the National Book Award for poetry from the National Book Foundation (2006), the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society (2008), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation (2014), the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from the Beinecke Library at Yale University (2015), the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress (2017), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2018), and the Nicolás Cristobál Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association (2024). He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches at Duke University, where he is the Reynolds Price Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing. He has previously taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1974-1976), the University of Southern California (1976-1979), and the University of California, Santa Cruz (1979-2010).
