Map to the Stars

by Adrian Matejka

Overview

A resonant new collection of poetry from Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke, a finalist for The Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award 

Map to the Stars, the fourth poetry collection from National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Adrian Matejka, navigates the tensions between race, geography, and poverty in America during the Reagan Era. In the time of space shuttles and the Strategic Defense Initiative, outer space is the only place equality seems possible, even as the stars serve to both guide and obscure the earthly complexities of masculinity and migration. In Matejka's poems, hope is the link between the convoluted realities of being poor and the inspiring possibilities of transcendence and escape—whether it comes from Star Trek, the dream of being one of the first black astronauts, or Sun Ra's cosmic jazz.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781524704148
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/28/2017
Series:	Penguin Poets
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Adrian Matejka's most recent collection of poetry is Somebody Else Sold the World. His other books are Map to the Stars; The Big Smoke, which was the winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and a finalist for both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize; Mixology, which was selected for the National Poetry Series; and The Devil's Garden (Alice James Books, 2003), winner of the New York / New England Award. Among Matejka's other honors are fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists. He served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018-19 and lives in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Table of Contents

Star-Struck Blacks 1

Constellations and Other Motives

Final Frontier 5

& Later 7

Read Between the Lines 9

Post-Vietnam Blacks 13

Mail-Order Planets 15

STARDATE 8107.15 17

Those Minor Regrets 19

How to Choose the Next City 23

Blacks Swinging Low 25

Unfunky UFO 27

STARDATE 8202.07 28

Trumpets Up in Here 29

Le voyage dans la lune 31

From the Get-Go Blacks 34

STARDATE 8205.01 35

So Far to Go 36

Everyone Needs a Chariot 37

Do Work 38

Ascendant Blacks 40

Beat Boxing 41

Beat Bop 43

Breaking Away 46

Boxing Out 48

Map to the Stars 50

Sounds of Earth

Sounds in Sequential Order (Edit) 53

Stars Already

Outta Here Blacks 67

STARDATE 8705.13 69

If You're Tired, Then Go Take a Nap 71

Intergalactic Blacks 72

Record Changer 74

Strange Celestial Roads 75

Space Is the Place 76

Sold to the Man with the Mouth 79

STARDATE 8705.29 81

Business as Usual 83

Crossover Blacks 85

I Remember When I Met U, Baby 87

New Developments 89

Basketball feat. Galileo & EPMD 90

Illinois Abe Lincoln's Hat 91

Welcome Back to Earth 92

Antique Blacks 95

Crickets, Racists 98

Emily Dickinson feat. Basketball & EPMD 100

STARDATE 8809.22 101

Code-Switching Blacks 102

After the Stars 103

Collectable Blacks 107

Notes 111

Acknowledgments 113

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/27/2017
In his stellar fourth collection, Matejka (The Big Smoke) evokes an Indianapolis boyhood in which economic and educational privations starkly contrast with the inspiring expanses of outer space. Newly identified planets, space shuttle launches, Star Trek, and Voyager probes encountered via radio, TV, and newspaper here become poignant emblems of escape (“I bought the star map shirt for 15¢ at the Value Village/ next to the Piccadilly”) or hallucinatory imaginings (“the rusting coils under the top bunk/ curling like unexplored galaxies”). While such popular figures as Prince, Richard Pryor, and Sun Ra make appearances, celebrities are dwarfed by the rich personalities of neighborhood folks, such as the friend’s mother who “tried to run her boyfriend over/ while he was stretched out near half court.” Matejka eschews philosophical rhetoric for a firm grounding in the organic rhythms of hip-hop and trash talk, offering surprising juxtapositions, as in “Emily Dickinson feat. Basketball & EPMD,” where “the laces of my suede// kicks come undone like the best-laid plans.” Capturing the associative energy of the Internet age, he leaves readers “bird-dogging the rhythms of the universe as you orbit/ the center of the skate floor like a B Side’s stepson.” Matejka’s witty tour de force achieves the rare feat of making a narrative centered in memory feel bracingly urgent and fresh. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Matejka offers a fresh set of figures for describing the youth of Black Americans now entering middle age. . .There is truly an astounding wealth of material here, cultural artifacts that add up to an ironclad allegory for the plight of urban African Americans in the ‘80s, which serves to point the way to where we are now.”
– The Los Angeles Times

“Map to the Stars unpacks human systems like race, poverty and parenting. But it also examines larger ones – like the system of gravity and momentum.  ‘The things,’ Matejka says, ‘that make the universe spin.’”
– PBS Newshour
 
“Covers an ever-expanding emotional landscape . . . and continues Matjejka’s investigation of race in the private and public spheres.”
– St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“In this seismic and sonic new Matejka collection Richard Pryor is an Indiana sun god and a Black boy waits impatiently for the solar system to alight inside his mailbox. Rich and ekphrastic, this journey of boy-to-man ascendance cradles the might and memoir of motherships and other two-legged planets that lift our chins to starlight then break us in two.”
—Nikky Finney

“Fueled by powdered milk, boom box tracks and Star Trek reruns, A Map to the Stars charts a poetic bildungsroman as well as a redemptive journey through music searching for ‘a little city of gleaming/ gallantry.’ These are mouth-watering poems full of ‘tough-guy shufflebucks’ and motherships ‘gorgeous as comets,’ a ‘vernacular hubbub’ that hurtles through our ‘violently Technicolor heliosphere’—and beyond. For a rocket-powered poet like Adrian Matejka, where else to aim but the stars?”  
—Campbell McGrath

“Matejka’s fourth book is a coming-of-age collage set in Reagan-era Indianapolis, a series of intimate verbal snapshots of African American youth and family life. The speaker of these poems is caught between lonesome artifacts of the past . . . and hopeful, strange, and complicated glimpses of possible futures . . . Matejka swirls these seemingly disparate parts into a stunningly coherent vision of life in the 1980s, growing up poor and black and full of energy and longing.”
– Craig Morgan Teicher, npr.org

“In his stellar fourth collection, Matejka evokes an Indianapolis boyhood in which economic and educational privations starkly contrast with the inspiring expanses of outer space . . . Matejka’s witty tour de force achieves the rare feat of making a narrative centered in memory feel bracingly urgent and fresh.”
– Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher