Tarnish and Masquerade (Unabridged Selections)

By: Roger Bonair-Agard

Narrated by: Roger Bonair-Agard

Roger Bonair-Agard, a veteran of the spoken-word scene and a two-time National Slam Champion, reads several of his poems from Tarnish and Masquerade, featuring a live reading in Munich, Germany. His poems chart an exile's coming-of-age and an increasingly relevant immigrant's experience. Whether set in Trinidad, Washington Heights, Texas, Brooklyn, or other less-fixed locales, these poems written (and spoken) with equal parts joy and fury are full of clarity, compassion and unsentimentality.

Poems include:

• "cane brulee"
• "chantuel hymns"
• "The devil in music"
• "Bullet Points"
• "1981"
• "The mandate"
• "photo graph"
• "1986"
• "Bird Watching"
• "weusi alphabet"
• "song for trent lott"
• "truth applies for a green card"
• "the sadness of migration"
• "blue sex prodigy"
• "weusi alphabeti" (live reading in Munich, Germany)
• "in the same breath as my father" (live reading in Munich, Germany)
• "how the ghetto loves us back" (live reading in Munich, Germany)
• "love rev 2" (live reading in Munich, Germany)
• "naming and other Christian things" (live reading in Munich, Germany)

©2006 Roger Bonair-Agard (P)2006 Rattapallax Press

Critic reviews

"Bonair-Agard is a poet who fixes his experience with memory and uses memory image as analyzer of his experience. A poet of live language mastering it's literary 'statement'. Someone whose poetry can be entered and felt and understood. An impressive work." (Amiri Baraka)