Blue Fasa

Mackey's hip, dense language is cued to a global soundtrack as he reengages with two serial poems that snake through his earlier works: "Song of the Andoumboulou" and "Mu." Improvisation is key, as is surrender to the journey, in this meandering saga of Pynchon-esque characters enveloped in strains of "Blue Bossa" (a jazz standard written by Kenny Dorham): "Something Vedic on the box,/ box or no box, sat ourselves/ down siphoning music./ Place played harmonium." Motifs recur, punctuated by a car crash: the polysemic stick city (as in the poem "Stick City Zazen"); the subhuman, subterranean Andoumboulou creatures of myth invented by the Fasa of Ghana; mu as the root of many words, including muse; the Zar cult of Sudan; incessant movement. The box—juke, boom, radio—is the life that one carries through an endless odyssey of migration: "with a box on our head we called/ home,/ box more hat than/ home." Mackey has won numerous honors, including a National Book Award for Splay Anthem in 2006. His work evokes overtones of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Michael Ondaatje, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Don Cherry—the list may be endless.