News at Eleven: The best poem in the book

is "Mr. Dynamite Splits," an elegy for James Brown published several months after Brown's death in December 2006. In the book, [Thomas Sayers] Ellis expands the poem into "A perform-a-form, photo-elegy with footnotes for feet work," with photographs taken by Ellis from outside the Apollo Theater, where the New York memorial to Brown was held forty-four years after Brown's concert there set the template for live recordings. The photographs--bewildered children next to mournful parents, smiling aging fans holding up tribute T-shirts, crowds behind barricades--go beyond illustrating the poem's celebration of a performer to give depth to the assertions in the poem:

from The Nation: One of the Various: On Thomas Sayers Ellis

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