Third Voice

Ruth Ellen Kocher is the author of eight previous books: godhouse; Third Voice, winner of the PEN Open Book Award; Ending in Planes; Goodbye Lyric: The Gigans and Lovely Gun; domina Un/blued, which won the Dorset Prize and the 2014 PEN/Open Book Award; One Girl Babylon, winner of the Green Rose Prize; When the Moon Knows You're Wandering; and Desdemona's Fire. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cave Canem Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo and is a contributing editor at Poets & Writers Magazine. She is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Colorado.

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Praising the power of lyric drama, T. S. Eliot described the use of third voice as a means for characters to address and interrogate one another, and second voice as a way for characters to talk to the audience. In this daring new book, the principal narrator presents as a caricature reflecting the tangible experiences of a disembodied "I" posed against absurd selfhood--a voice imbued by sublime otherness. Within a dismantled minstrel show, Ruth Ellen Kocher frames a female voice splintered and re-figured as "self" and "character." The incomprehensible nature of the sublime emerges through a cast of other personages including Eartha Kitt, Geordi LaForge, Emmanuel Kant, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Malcolm X. THIRD VOICE asserts lyric beyond personal expression and drama beyond the stage, using the spectacle of minstrelsy as a deformation of mastery in an audaciously conceptual yet visceral performance.