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Transparent Eye, Voice Howling Within: Codes of Violence in Lawrence Joseph's Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Frank D. Rashid
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Extract

In the early quatrains of “Rubaiyat,” a poem in Lawrence Joseph's fourth book, into it, The poet adopts a curious perspective for an American poet of Arab ancestry who is intensely critical of American military aggression. Taking on the “eye” of the aggressor, he pulls up the “satellite image of a major / military target, a 3-D journey / into a landscape of hills and valleys.” He follows the lens as it zooms closer to the ground:

Zoom in close enough—the shadows

of statues, the swimming pools of palaces …

closer—a garden of palm trees,

oranges and lemons, chickens, sheep. … (41)

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 123 , Issue 5: Special Topic Comparative Racialization , October 2008 , pp. 1611 - 1620
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

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