shrimp
by jason elong vasser
with an Introduction by Michael Castro
APR. 2018 | ISBN: 978-1-940939-67-4 (Print)
JUN. 2018 | ISBN: 978-1-940939-81-0 (eBook)
BOOK INFO | AVAILABLE @ AMAZON
When I sent out a call for books for Spring 2018, jason vasser-elong, who was a contributor to BLACK LIVES HAVE ALWAYS MATTERED (2017) sent me his manuscript for SHRIMP. The title caught my attention, and I asked myself, “What does this mean?” When I went through it, I got the sense that this was a guy searching for answers about self. But the manuscript was not large enough to be a full-length book, so I accepted jason’s work with the proviso that he provided me with more poetry to fill out the book.
jason is a professor in St. Louis, Missouri (born and raised) and majored in creative writing and anthropology, so his work goes into great depth culturally and historically, from Cameroon to St. Louis to self-discovery. When Jason submitted the additional poetry, the quality of the work, just like his initial submission, was top tier and, he had few revisions to his work.
Certainly not surprising. St. Louis, which has a long history of artistic excellence of poets and writers, is also known as the birthplace of rhythm and blues and the “City of Gabriels” because of the amazing horn players that came from its music scene. The Center of St. Louis Poetry has been around since 1946. The Black Artists’ Group (BAG), which flourished between 1968 and 1972, gave rise to a host of nationally recognized African American figures, including Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill and Hamiet Bluiett, and poets like Shirley Bradley LeFlore, Eugene Redmond, and Quincy Troupe. Michael Castro, who wrote the introduction to SHRIMP, was St. Louis’ first poet laureate, and has a been a fixture on the St. Louis poetry scene for years. jason follows the tradition of these community artists-activists who have used their art to excavate and delve into the complex and multifaceted nature of the region.
But while I was surprised and grateful that jason’s poetry revisions were minimal, the cover became a different story. The cover, which I believed conceptually, had been secured and agreed upon in late 2017, at the last minute ended up going through several permutations before we got to this final one. (I am forever grateful to Dé-Jon Graves‘ efforts on the cover.) Let’s just say that in the end, I chalked it up to the fact that this was jason’s first book ever, and he was excited and jittery about its debut.
While the main focus of SHRIMP is to examine how identity and culture are conceived and articulated through poetry, jason uses words to express complex ideas in an emotional and relatable way. Isn’t this the best poetry to read? It’s also what makes SHRIMP a wonderful debut for up and coming poet jason vasser-elong, whose works, I suspect, we will be reading for years to come.
