from “Deleuze & Guattari”
Raise your eyes along the spires of Green-Wood Cemetery
or stand on the ball fields of Brooklyn College in Hopperesque
light. Quaker Parrots will appear to you like the visions
of St. Francis, lift the snatches of sound woven to make their
voices and call to you from their nests, a nation of cheer
trumpets and conch shells, a frenzied population of twitching,
toes. They seduce us not simply with their tropical verve…
Prize winner, 2015
Totem, received the American Poetry Review/Honickman Prize in 2007. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, Tin House, as well as anthologies including Angles of Ascent: the Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry and two editions of Best American Poetry. He is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a fellowship for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received other fellowships from the New York Times, the MacDowell Colony, the Lotos Club Foundation, and Cave Canem. He is currently a teaching fellow in Undergraduate Writing at Columbia University. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for his collection Digest.
Excerpted from poetryfoundation.org