Local History
ROOF Books, 1993/2003; 2010
Price: $9.95
ISBN: 9780937804537
Paperback
73 Pages
Purchase: ROOF Books | SPD | Amazon
From the Publisher:
Local History, written almost entirely in prose, has tapped the warp and woof of the poetic line for its telling. And tell it does! Erica Hunt has elected the word to represent social events, and chosen political realities as that stone against which words might sharpen themselves. The caustic in her voice is medicine not poison; and as we read we know that we in every way deserve our part of it. This present catches up the future. Erica lives in New York City where she makes a living by confronting and changing some of the recalcitrant social conditions of the African-American place and time. This commitment is evidenced in Local History, as the title itself implies. The book is itself part of the solutions she has demanded in her progressive political action. Local History is a mosaic of those of her writings which she chose to maintain. Its mostly-prose sections are organized in a way that invites reading, and not perusal. One moves through it much as one would through a novel, its sections more chapters than not.
Praise
“Erica Hunt's Local History blows the public and the personal inside out, estranging familiar forms of writing, letter and diary, while snatching moments of intimacy and insight in disembodied prose that anatomizes artifacts of mass culture, such as screenplay and cartoon strip.”
—Harryette Mullen
“Hunt's resonant and elegant reworking of prose as a form of poetry reflects her social commitment to an ethical writing practice that exuberantly interrogates its own expressive potentialities. A new poet demands new readers. Hunt's poetry, it seems to me, demands a new public.”
—Charles Bernstein