This image is the cover for the book Mr. West, Wesleyan Poetry Series

Mr. West, Wesleyan Poetry Series

Mr. West covers the main events in superstar Kanye West's life while also following the poet on her year spent researching, writing, and pregnant. The book explores how we are drawn to celebrities—to their portrayal in the media—and how we sometimes find great private meaning in another person's public story, even across lines of gender and race. Blake's aesthetics take her work from prose poems to lineated free verse to tightly wound lyrics to improbably successful sestinas. The poems fully engage pop culture as a strange, complicated presence that is revealing of America itself. This is a daring debut collection and a groundbreaking work. An online reader's companion will be available at http://sarahblake.site.wesleyan.edu.

Sarah Blake

Sarah Blake is the author of poetry collections In Springtime, and epic poem of survival with a gender-neutral protagonist; Let's Not Live On Earth, featuring the long form science fiction poem The Starship and Mr. West an unauthorized lyric biography of Kanye West. Blake's debut novel, Naamah, a provocative imagining of the story of Noah, won a National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction. Her second novel, Clean Air, was published in 2023. Blake has taught at the College of New Jersey, the University of Texas and Penn State, where she was co-coordinator of the MFA Reading Series. She holds a MA in English from the University of Texas and a MFA from Penn State.

Wesleyan University Press