L-vis Lives!

FROM THE POET the Chicago Tribune calls the new voice of Chicago, comes L-vis Lives!, a bold new collection of poetry and prose exploring the collision of race, art, and appropriation in American culture.L-vis is an imagined persona, a representation of artists who have used and misused Black music. Like so many others who gained fame and fortune from their sampling, L-vis is as much a sincere artist as he is a thief. In Kevin Coval's poems, L-vis' story is equal parts forgotten history, autobiography, and re-imaginings. We see shades of Elvis Presley, the Beastie Boys, and Eminem, and meet some of history's more obscure whiteboy heroes and anti-heroes: legendary breakdancers, political activists, and music impresarios.A story of both artistic theft and radical invention, L-vis Lives! is a poetic novella on all of the possibilities and problems of post-racial American culturewhere Black art is still at times only fully accepted in a white face, and every once in a while an L-vis comes along to step in to the void.i am a heroto most. the great hopeof something other.a complex back-story.something other thanthe business of my father.blands antonym.jim crows black sheep.the forgotten sonleft to rise in the darknessamong the discarded in the wildof working class, singlemother hoods. a herowho transcendswho translates the dissatisfactions of the plains;kids of kurt cobain,method man amphetamine,the odd Iowan who digs dirtand lights beyond the pig yard,spits nebraskan argot,hero to the heartland, middle brow(n) america