ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the violent deaths–at the hands of the police or vigilantes–of African American men, women and children in the twenty-first century. It explores how poets innovate in three distinct, but related, elegiac modes: the HIV elegy, the last words poem and the political corpse poem. Contemporary African American practitioners of the elegy position their work to contribute to and actively foment political engagement and activism in memory of victims of white supremacist violence. The collection is broad in scope and addresses moments in American history from settlement, through the civil rights movement, to a contemporary point of reflection and memory. “Elegy for Maque Choux” is personal but draws on the African American culinary tradition and the history of black life in the South, and Young mourns a loss of communal knowledge more directly than the loss of the individual. Kevin Young’s exercises in personal consolation become increasingly expansive in the period between 2008 and 2014.
