Slingshots (A Hip-Hop Poetica)
His new book, Slingshots (A Hip-Hop Poetica), is an ambitious thing, at once memoir, search for identity, and bitch fest about the society that makes that search both imperative and damn near impossible. The speaker of these poems is, like Coval, a Jewish kid from the Chicago suburbs. More suburban than Jewish, he wandered that desert alone until, in the 1980s, he discovered KRS-One and Jam Master Jay and, he writes, putting a Jewish spin on Afrika Bambaataa, “breakbeats let my g-dSelf loose.” It was his discovery of hip-hop, with its incessant rhythms and its insistence that one represent–be true to oneself and let others know who you are–that led him back to a Judaism he could fully embrace. One night after watching prayers in a synagogue, he writes, “for the first time I davened / with the energy and ecstasy of a b-boy in battle.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I don’t know why he thinks he can’t do dinner with the vastly amusing Collins. Maybe it’s the parsnips. Or maybe this “baggy pants Carl Sandburg” (as he calls himself in “heB-boy poetica: travel/in man”) feels they come from camps too different to break bread together, and maybe that’s so. But if there’s little peace, love, or unity between the two, that leaves having fun. So choose your pleasure–hit the open mike or curl up with a good book. Either way you’ll be OK, as long as you don’t stay home with Slingshots.
Info: 773-772-8108
