In Spirit Boxing, Weaver revisits his working class core. The veteran of fifteen years as a factory worker in his native Baltimore, he mines his own experience to build a wellspring of craft in poems that extend from his life to the lives that inhabit the whole landscape of the American working class. He writes with an intimacy that is unique in American poetry, and echoes previous comparisons of his oeuvre to that of Walt Whitman. The singularity of his voice resonates here through the prism of his realization of self through a lifelong project of the integration of American and Chinese culture. The work is Daoist in influence and structure as it echoes both a harmonic realization of context and the intuitive and transcendent dance of body, mind, and spirit.
| Preface |
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xi | |
| Xu Bing's Flying Phoenixes |
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3 | (4) |
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John Henry Sleeping in High Grass |
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7 | (1) |
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Where the Steel of Ploughs |
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8 | (2) |
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10 | (1) |
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11 | (5) |
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The Lay of Paradise, 1970 |
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16 | (1) |
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A Baby in the Crash of '29 |
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17 | (2) |
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19 | (8) |
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27 | (1) |
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28 | (1) |
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29 | (2) |
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The Bluesman Speaks on Original Man |
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31 | (2) |
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33 | (2) |
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The Worker We Named Freight Train & His Revelation of Ezekiel's Vision |
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35 | (2) |
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When They Fired Our Magician |
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37 | (2) |
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39 | (1) |
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40 | (2) |
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42 | (1) |
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43 | (1) |
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Beatitudes, the Peacemakers |
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44 | (2) |
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When Hard Men Love Each Other |
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46 | (2) |
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Freight Train Returns from the Hospital |
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48 | (2) |
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50 | (3) |
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A Truck Driver from West Virginia |
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53 | (1) |
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54 | (2) |
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56 | (2) |
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Freight Train Watches Me Do My Taiji |
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58 | (2) |
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In Mencken's Neighborhood |
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60 | (5) |
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65 | (1) |
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66 | (1) |
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67 | (1) |
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Interiors, a Miner's Home |
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68 | (1) |
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Grabbing Lunch in the Morgue |
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69 | (1) |
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70 | (1) |
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71 | (1) |
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72 | (1) |
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73 | (1) |
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74 | (1) |
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75 | (1) |
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Blood of a Union of States |
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76 | (2) |
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Mr. Fugg's Hardware Store |
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78 | (2) |
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80 | (1) |
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81 | (1) |
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82 | (3) |
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85 | (1) |
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86 | (2) |
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The Architecture of Factories, 1985 |
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88 | (2) |
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Ode to the Righteous Union |
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90 | (3) |
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93 | (4) |
| Notes |
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97 | (2) |
| Acknowledgments |
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99 | |
Afaa Michael Weaver is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Timber and Prayer: The Indian Pond Poems; My Fathers Geography; The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005; The Government of Nature, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award ;
