You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY Eschewing series and performative typography, Douglas Kearney’s Sho aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks. Navigating the complex penetrability of language, these poems are sonic in their espousal of Black vernacular traditions, while examining histories, pop culture, myth, and folklore. Both dazzling and devastating, Sho is a genius work of literary precision, wordplay, farce, and critical irony. In his “stove-like imagination,” Kearney has concocted poems that destabilize the spectacle, leaving looky-loos with an important uncertainty about the intersection between violence and entertainment.
The third book by Whiting Writers’ Award-winning poet Douglas Kearney, author of The Black Automaton, a National Poetry Series selection.
Stealing tropes from militancy to minstrelsy, Fear, some broadcasts from the slippery moments when personal, national, racial and aesthetic anxieties overlap. These poems seek to pressurize content ("At the Pink Teacup"), language ("Atomic Buckdance") and form (the Blaxploitation epic-remix, "(dig) Bloom is Boom, Sucka!") until they evoke suspicion, tension, fear and the laughter that rattles after the horrifyingly ridiculous.
From its earliest days to today, poetry has always been a spoken art. On the page and out loud, poetry is the home for the brilliant, the rebellious, the artists and performers who are changing the world. Today's spoken word revolution is the literary equivalent to grabbing a culture by the collar and shaking it...hard. In the tradition of The Spoken Word Revolution, Redux brings more of the gripping, moving, innovative, often hilarious poetry in the oral tradition. This redefining collection gathers multiple forms of "spoken word" under the same motley tent—slam, hip-hop, musical interpretations, and youth movements among them. The resulting brew is both satisfying and world-expanding. On...
Cameron Awkward-Rich's Transit, runner-up for the 2014 Button Poetry Prize, takes the reader on a constantly surprising journey through gender and identity in contemporary America. Awkward-Rich's academic prowess shines throughout, as does his remarkable ability to condense an essay's worth of thought and theory into a few poignant lines. A book to be read anywhere and everywhere: in a classroom, on the subway, under blankets on a cold winter night.
Hip-Hop is the largest youth culture in the history of the planet rock. This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation. It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters. The BreakBeat Poets is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who've never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for. The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment. The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.
None
In his most expansive and unruly collection to date, the acclaimed poet Charles Bernstein gathers poems, both tiny and grand, that speak to a world turned upside down. Our time of “covidity,” as Bernstein calls it in one of the book’s most poignantly disarming works, is characterized in equal measure by the turbulence of both the body politic and the individual. Likewise, in Topsy-Turvy, novel and traditional forms jostle against one another: horoscopes, shanties, and elegies rub up against gags, pastorals, and feints; translations, songs, screenplays, and slapstick tangle deftly with commentaries, conundrums, psalms, and prayers. Though Bernstein’s poems play with form, they incorpo...
Poetry. "SWOLE full y'all--of what flotsam language is when time comes to name the wrongs befalling (some of) us. A songbook of catastrophes--these, big as bodies, small as cities--Marchan's reeling debut is the real thing. She washed her lines in Katrina's filthy water till they smeared into gendercrit mondegreens, broad dialects, Yung Crank's crunk-ass barz, and syntax that's at once saturated and eroded. Reckoning the wreckage, she writes: 'after the rain has left my room coldish / ... I light / candles makes me feel / oceanic or just salty'--vast and pissed, deep and caustic, SWOLE near bursts with poetry."--Douglas Kearney "Against the impulse to 'draw lines as a kind of forgetting,' Je...
Every two years, on the occasion of the Made in L.A. biennial, the Hammer Museum presents the Mohn Award to an artist whose work in the exhibition is exceptional. The 2018 winner was Lauren Halsey for her piece The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project (Prototype Architecture), a large structure made of plywood and gypsum and covered in bas-relief carvings. These carvings-depicting graffiti, community members, and other elements significant to South Central Los Angeles where Halsey grew up-evoke the hieroglyphs found on Egyptian temples. This book also explores a range of Halsey's earlier work and includes original texts by poet and performer Douglas Kearney, curator Anne Ellegood, as well as an interview between the artist and curator Erin Christovale.