Faster Than Light

By Marilyn Nelson,

Book cover of Faster Than Light: New and Selected Poems, 1996-2011

Book description

Conjuring numerous voices and characters across oceans and centuries, Faster Than Light explores widely disparate experiences through the lens of traditional poetic forms. This volume contains a selection of Marilyn Nelson's new and uncollected poems as well as work from each of her lyric histories of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century…

Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Why read it?

1 author picked Faster Than Light as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Marilyn Nelson’s poetry is staggeringly good, particularly the way she writes formal poems—sonnets!—in a humble voice, like her sonnet “From an Alabama Farmer.” Nelson’s poem “To the Confederate Dead,” with its epigraph by Allen Tate is a better poem than Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” with which it is in conversation. Nelson’s ‘wreath’ of sonnets, “A Wreath for Emmett Till,” is simply sublime.

From Hollis' list on Black poetry.

Want books like Faster Than Light?

Our community of 11,000+ authors has personally recommended 100 books like Faster Than Light.

Browse books like Faster Than Light

5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in African Americans, poets, and women?

African Americans 804 books
Poets 73 books
Women 647 books