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by Richard Levine (Author)
From its "Cover Letter" to readers, Now in Contest invites us to listen to America's many voices and how they are divided from each other and our history. From the many in contest, it listens for one hope to go forward into today and tomorrow. Consider the young Black veteran pulled over "One Night in America," and the immigrant day laborers who endure stereotyping so their kids... grow straight American teeth. Listen to a young boy who sees us caught in... the eyes of wolves / in Jack London stories, / where prospectors huddle(d) / close to a dying fire, and the voice of a man stunned to faith by the scent of clover and milkweed... the earth / shakes me, breathing a life-awakening / fragrance into my nostrils.
There is a Holocaust survivor named Isadore wondering aloud... how can we be capable of composing / and appreciating a sonata (yet) aspire to genocide?, while his still innocent grandson... (a) prodigal punster (asks)... grandpa is a door? And who is listening to the teacher of high-risk students asking - Don't (you) see Stink Street's children as children? / Don't (you) see my breathless wards as kids?, and who hears the combat veteran from that same neighborhood who... want(s) / never again to be treated like a spic in America. All these characters and many more come forward in Richard Levine's Now in Contest, to speak in voices as varied snowflakes, to witness, to testify, to ask, as a disheartened Marvin Gaye asked generations ago, "What's Going On?"
