Wannabe Hootchie Mama Gallery of Realities' Red Dress Code
New and Selected Poems
Thylias Moss

Thylias Moss, one of American poetry’s great innovators, is a national taxonomist and secular preacher who catalogues our culture and responds in gorgeous outrage to its injustices. This career-spanning volume conveys the hypnotic spectrum of her full poetic output, from Hosiery Seams on a Bowlegged Woman, her 1983 debut, to Slave Moth, her acclaimed 2006 novel in verse, to more than fifty pages of new poems. 

“It’s tempting to confuse Moss with the characters she describes, so deeply does she appear to inhabit their lives. . .[with] her trademark intensity and ferocious intelligence.”
—Jabari Asim, Washington Post Book World

“As if the muse of Wallace Stevens were transplanted into the body of a black, female pop-culture maven.”
—David Yaffe, Village Voice

Thylias Moss is Professor Emerita in the departments of English and Art & Design at the University of Michigan. Her eight previous books of poetry include Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Slave Moth, named Best Poetry Book of 2004 by Black Issues Book Review, Tokyo Butter, and Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky.

Hardcover / $29.95 (Can $39.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-412-6 / 248 pages / Poetry

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