L-vis lives!

FROM THE POET the Chicago Tribune calls the new voice of Chicago, comes L-vis Lives!, a bold new collection of poetry and prose exploring the collision of race, art, and appropriation in American culture. L-vis is an imagined persona, a representation of artists who have used and misused Black music. Like so many others who gained fame and fortune from their sampling, L-vis is as much a sincere artist as he is a thief. In Kevin Coval's poems, L-vis' story is equal parts forgotten history, autobiography, and re-imaginings. We see shades of Elvis Presley, the Beastie Boys, and Eminem, and meet some of history's more obscure whiteboy heroes and anti-heroes: legendary breakdancers, political activists, and music impresarios. A story of both artistic theft and radical invention, L-vis Lives! is a poetic novella on all of the possibilities and problems of post-racial" American culture-where Black art is still at times only fully accepted in a white face, and every once in a while an L-vis" comes along to step in to the void. i am a hero to most. the great hope of something other. a complex back-story. something other than the business of my father. Bland's antonym. jim crow's black sheep