Talking Dirty to the Gods and the Infinitude of Language: Or Mr. Komunyakaa's Cabinet of Wonder

The Sep 2000 publication of Yusef Komunyakka's Talking Dirty to the Gods gives reviewers many things to respond to, and they have responded most frequently to the formal properties of the poems, their subjects, and the extreme density and allusiveness of the entire volume. Salas explores how Talking Dirty thematically dovetails neatly with Komunyakaa's previous work, evidencing, as it does, the poet's interest in race, war, guilt, and the ambiguous place of humans in the larger, often pitiless, world. Formally, however, the volume differs from much of his earlier work.