This powerful new collection of Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetry delves into an age of war and conflict, both global and internal, racial and sexual. “Sweetheart, was I talking war in my sleep / again?” he asks, and the question is hardly moot: “Sometimes I hold you like Achilles’ / shield,” and indeed all relationships, in this telling, are sites of violence and battle. His line is longer and looser than in Taboo and Talking Dirty to the Gods, and in long poems like “The Autobiography of My Alter Ego” he sounds almost breathless, an exhausted, desperate prophet. Warhorses is the stunning work of a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet who never ceases to challenge and delight his readers.


Yusef Komunyakaa began publishing his poetry during the turbulent 1960s, a period that included what has been called the Second New Negro Movement, suggesting the fervor that characterized the Harlem Renaissance. His early verse appeared in such periodicals as Black American Literature Forum, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Chameleon, Colorado Quarterly, Free Lance, and Poetry Now. Some of his Vietnam verse has been collected in Carrying the Darkness, an anthology edited by W.D. Ehrhart, and in The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets. Most of his poems that were published in journals are reprinted, some in altered versions, in his first full-length book, Lost in the Bonewheel Factory (1979).

Born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, on 29 April 1947, Yusef Komunyakaa attended public school there, graduating from Central High School in 1965. Immediately thereafter he entered the U.S.Army, doing a tour in Vietnam, for which he earned the Bronze Star and during which he served as correspondent for and editor of the Southern Cross . After returning to the States, Komunyakaa entered the University of Colorado, where he earned his B.A. in 1975; he then attended Colorado State University and received his M.A. in 1979. He earned an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of California, Irvine, in 1980.

Komunyakaa taught English at the Lake-front Campus of the University of New Orleans, and for a brief period he taught poetry for grades three through six in the public schools of New Orleans. He has received several grants from learned societies and is an associate professor of arts and sciences at Indiana University at Bloomington, where he has taught since 1985. During the academic year 1989-1990 he held the Ruth Lilly Professorship, an endowed chair. Each year he reads his poems at colleges, universities, and museums in the United States and abroad. He has also lived briefly in Australia, Saint Thomas, Puerto Rico, and Japan...

Yusef Komunyakaa has come of age, not only as a Southern-American or African-American bard, but as a world-class poet who is careful to restrain the emotions and moods he creates, without overdoing ethnicity of any kind. In his Vietnam verse he keeps before the world what it meant and still means to be American, black, and a soldier, and what the painful inequities of this combination add up to. His poetry is as rhythmic and fluid as his speaking voice, and just as mellow and introspective.
-- Jones, Kirkland C. "Yusef Komunyakaa." American Poets Since World War II: Third Series. Ed. R. S. Gwynn. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 120. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. Literature Resource Center. Gale.