Avalanche

Poetry. "Troupe has that rare gift, the ability to transfer his sound to the page.. The typical Troupe poem comes at the reader like a locomotive on fire, full of blazing and powerful imagery" -Ishmael Reed, The San Diego Reader.

A collection of poetry about men, women, jazz, and American life.

Publishers Weekly

Troupe heaves a cold, smacking "rush of objects" down an American mountainside of dreams and injustices. A respected chronicler of the lives of James Baldwin and Miles Davis and the son of a prominent Negro league catcher, Troupe (Snake-Back Solos) is an innovator of form and tone who shifts quickly from a lofty, elegiac mode into burlesque or smoky, jazzed-down pop phraseology. He plays on history, "riffin' on in full of rain & pain/ spacin' on in on a sound/ like coltrane." But Troupe also registers history's price, as in repeated images of an old manboth perpetrator and victim"holding his age tight as two opaque roses/ in cataracted eyes." Troupe is still at his best when he indulges in deep, obsessive curves into music: "caaa-rack// the assonance of sound breaking from ground/ breaking away from itself & found in the bounding syllables of snow/ moving now." He writes with unchecked expression, redundant and inclusive. If it were any more laden, Avalanche would be inchoate. Any less would be our loss. (Apr.)

Featured on two PBS poetry series, Troupe is the author of seven volumes of poetry including Transcircularities, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and Minnesotabased Talking Volumes bookclub selection. In addition to children's books on Magic Johnson and Stevie Wonder, Troupe chronicled his friendship with Miles Davis in Miles and Me, soon to be a feature film.