Flashback through the heart

the long version

"Flashback Through the Heart: The Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa seeks to address the conundrum of reading African-American poets as racial spokespeople, and to model alternative ways of addressing their work, thereby freeing them to set their own aesthetic agenda. While the larger point is that reading African-American authors as racial commentators rather than as artists results in profoundly limited interpretations of their work, this text seeks to make the point through a reading of Komunyakaa's career and his four most recent volumes of poetry. In doing so, the author seeks to convince readers that Komunyakaa has never been solely interested in dealing with the complexities of race in his work, although he does so to stunning effect in such works as Dien Cai Dau, a volume invoking the horrors of the war in Vietnam."--BOOK JACKET.