Turning into Dwelling

Book excerpt: A milestone publication of the late Christopher Gilbert's poetry, with an introduction by the National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes Lord, the anguish of my Black block rises up in me like a grief. My only chance to go beyond being breach— to resist being quelled as a bit of inner city entropy— is to speak up for the public which has birthed me. To build this language house. To make this case. Create. This loving which lives outside time. Lord, this is time. —from "Turning into Dwelling" Christopher Gilbert's award-winning Across the Mutual Landscape has become an underground classic of contemporary American poetry. Now reissued and presented with Gilbert's never-before-published last manuscript written before his death in 2007, Turning into Dwelling offers new readers the original music and vision of one of our most inventive poets.