The Big Smoke
Winner of the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
Finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
Finalist for the 2013 National Book Award in Poetry
Penguin Books (May 2013), 128 Pages, 5-1/2 x 8-7/16, ISBN 9780143123729, $18.00
Purchase: Your local bookstore (Indiebound) / Penguin
From the publisher: A finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in Poetry—a collection that examines the myth and history of the prizefighter Jack Johnson. The legendary Jack Johnson (1878–1946) was a true American creation. The child of emancipated slaves, he overcame the violent segregationism of Jim Crow, challenging white boxers—and white America—to become the first African-American heavyweight world champion. The Big Smoke, Adrian Matejka’s third work of poetry, follows the fighter’s journey from poverty to the most coveted title in sports through the multi-layered voices of Johnson and the white women he brazenly loved. Matejka’s book is part historic reclamation and part interrogation of Johnson’s complicated legacy, one that often misremembers the magnetic man behind the myth.
Praise & Reviews
“In this revelatory work, Adrian Matejka makes a chamber opera out of the highly mythologized and often deeply misunderstood life of Jack Johnson. Through the virtuosic interplay of voices, Matejka forces us to interrogate our own complicity in making histories that focus on the prize fights and the flashy cars while ignoring (and perhaps abetting) the intimate struggles and losses, the cruelties occurring in the places we call home, that make the rifts in our lives and our country deepen. This is a startlingly human book whose gorgeous language never keeps us from the harder truths and myths that make and unmake all of us.”
—Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of Apocalyptic Swing
“Just as we finally get a grip on the volatile Jack Johnson, Adrian Matejka, in his collection of poems, The Big Smoke, gives us a man wrestling with myth. He assays a figure bigger than life, and we see a legend shaped by American history—heroic and antiheroic—that is humanized by moments of poetic exhilaration as well as downfall. This poet’s Jack Johnson is made of sweat, blood, and vulnerability. Unadorned and honed, the poems in The Big Smoke are seasoned with easeful authority but jaunty as the Eagle Rock.”
—Yusef Komunyakaa, author of The Chameleon Couch
"Matejka captures what is beautifully human about Johnson. Within one body, there exists a muscled courage, a spirit as vibrant as his Flyer’s engine, as well as a flawed value system and an unapologetic misogynistic attitude. This collection does not ask the reader to assign herself as an admirer or an opponent of Johnson. Instead, it asks her to conceive that a person is a gathering of contradictions."
– Ashley Warner for The Journal
"Matejka’s project straddles that risky line between life and art, and some readers may question whether it transforms Johnson’s life sufficiently into art, but others will find this to be a powerful and accessible poetry collection."
"With the lean, long jab and agile step of a boxer, Adrian Matejka delivers this knockout dramatization of the larger-than-life life of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. In dexterous interpolating voices, and in forms ranging from enveloping sonnets to prose letters and interviews, Johnson emerges as a scrappy, hard-edged hero—troubled by his own demons but determined to win the “fight of the century,” a fight that underscored the bitter realities of racism in America. These poems don’t pull no punches."
– National Book Awards Committee, 2013
"The same tendency toward fantasy makes many persona poems feel like projections of the poet rather than reconsiderations of the subject. Thankfully, Matejka resists pure fantasy and artifice; treatment of Jack Johnson is complicated and passionate."