FROM THE POET the Chicago Tribune calls “the new voice of Chicago,” comes L-vis Lives!, a bold new collection of poetry and prose exploring the collision of race, art, and appropriation in American culture.

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.

A story of both artistic theft and radical invention, L-vis Lives! 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.

i am a heroto most. the great hopeof something other.a complex back-story.something other thanthe business of my father.bland’s antonym.jim crow’s black sheep.the forgotten sonleft to rise in the darknessamong the discarded in the wildof working class, singlemother hoods. a herowho transcendswho translates the dissatisfactions of the plains;kids of kurt cobain,method man amphetamine,the odd Iowan who digs dirtand lights beyond the pig yard,spits nebraskan argot,hero to the heartland, middle brow(n) america

Kevin Coval

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