SOURCE: "The Gender of Grief," in The Southern Review, Vol. 29, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 405-19.

Waniek is an American educator, poet, and critic. In the following excerpt, she examines Magic City, stating Komunyakaa "makes a great contribution to one of the newest genres in the canon: the black male epic of self."

Magic City, Yusef Komunyakaa's eighth book of poems, is punctuated by dramatic encounters, most of them racial. The thrust of the book is clearly autobiographical, yet its subject remains for the most part a point of view, clear-eyed and loving, yet rarely differentiated from the communal "we." Partly a Bildungsroman and partly an album of snapshots by which a neighborhood can remember its history, the book is rooted in family, community, and place. In "Glory," Komunyakaa remembers baseball games played by

       … married teenagers
       Working knockout shifts daybreak
       To sunset six days a week—
       Already old men playing...