Annotations

Front Cover
New Directions Publishing, 1995 - Fiction - 85 pages
An experimental first novel of poem-like compression, Annotations has a great deal to say about growing up Black in St. Louis. Reminiscent of Jean Toomer's Cane, the book is in part a meditation on African-American autobiography. Keene explores questions of identity from many angles--from race to social class to sexuality (gay and straight). Employing all manner of textual play and rhythmic and rhetorical maneuvers, he (re)creates his life story as a jazz fugue-in-words.
 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
11
Section 2
15
Section 3
19
Section 4
25
Section 5
29
Section 6
33
Section 7
37
Section 8
41
Section 10
51
Section 11
55
Section 12
59
Section 13
63
Section 14
67
Section 15
71
Section 16
75
Copyright

Section 9
45

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About the author (1995)

John Keene is the author, co-author, and translator of a handful of books, including Annotations (1995) and Counternarratives (2015), both published by New Directions. Counternarratives received an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award, a Republic of Consciousness Prize (UK), and a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His most recent publication, Punks: New & Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021), received the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle and a 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, he is Distinguished Professor and serves as department chair at Rutgers University-Newark