<B>In a stunning new collection of poems of transport and transcendence, African-American poet Nathaniel Mackey's "asthmatic song of aspiration" scuttles across cultures and historiesfrom America to Andalucia, from Ethiopia to Viennain a sexy, beautiful adaptive dance.</B><br/><br/>Part antiphonal rant, part rhythmic whisper, Nathaniel Mackey's new collection of poems, <I>Splay Anthem</I>, takes the reader to uncharted poetic spaces. Divided into three sections"Braid," "Fray," and "Nub" (one referent Mackey notes in his stellar Introduction: "the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become, the shrunken place the earth has become, planet Nub")<I>Splay Anthem</I> weaves together two ongoing serial poems Mackey has been writing for over twenty years, <I>Song of the Andoumboulou</I> and <I>"Mu"</I> (though "mu no more itself / than Andoumboulou").<br/><br/>In the cosmology of the Dogon of West Africa, the Andoumboulou are progenitor spirits, and the song of the Andoumboulou is a song addressed to the spirits, a funeral song, a song of rebirth. <I>"Mu,"</I> too, splays with meaning: <I>muni</I> bird, Greek <I>muthos</I>, a Sun Ra tune, a continent once thought to have existed in the Pacific. With the vibrancy of a Mira painting, Mackey's poems trace the lost tribe of "we" through waking and dreamtime, through a multitude of geographies, cultures, histories, and musical traditions, as poetry here serves as the intersection of everything, myth's music, spirit lift.