<DIV>FROM THE POET the <I>Chicago Tribune</I> calls ?the new voice of Chicago,” comes <I>L-vis Lives!</I>, a bold new collection of poetry and prose exploring the collision of race, art, and appropriation in American culture.<BR><BR>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.<br><BR>A story of both artistic theft and radical invention, <I>L-vis Lives!</I> 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.<BR><BR><I>i am a hero<br>to most. the great hope<br>of something other.<br>a complex back-story.<br>something other than<br>the business of my father.<br>bland's antonym.<br>jim crow's black sheep.<br>the forgotten son<br>left to rise in the darkness<br>among the dis<br>carded in the wild<br>of working class, single<br>mother hoods. a hero<br>who transcends<br>who translates the dis<br>satisfactions of the plains;<br>kids of kurt cobain,<br>method man amphetamine,<br>the odd Iowan who digs dirt<br>and lights beyond the pig yard,<br>spits nebraskan argot,<br>hero to the heart<br>land, middle brow(n) america </I><BR></DIV>