17 pages • 34 minutes read
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“Slam, Dunk, & Hook” is a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa, first published in 1991 in the journal Callaloo and appearing again in Komunyakaa’s 1992 collection Magic City. It has since become one of the best-known of Komunyakaa’s poems, helping to establish him as one of the foremost voices in modern American poetry.
Komunyakaa began publishing poetry in the 1970s, after returning from the Vietnam War where he served as a reporter. His poems often sought to explore themes around race and the Vietnam experience from the perspective of Black servicemen dealing with the trauma of war overseas and racism at home. Representing the culmination of his Vietnam poems, the 1988 collection Dien Cai Dau won the Dark Room poetry prize and was praised as being among the finest poetic representations of the Vietnam War. Perhaps feeling that he had finally managed to say what he wanted to about Vietnam, Komunyakaa then turned his mind back to his own childhood in the poems which came to form the Magic City collection, with “Slam, Dunk, & Hook” as one of the foremost examples.
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By Yusef Komunyakaa