About this item
Winner of the 2016 Levis Reading PrizeWinner of the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize Finalist for the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award Rickey Luarentiis is a winner of a 2018 Whiting Writers Prize. In a landscape at once the brutal American South as it is the brutal mind, Boy with Thorn interrogates the genesis of all poetic creation - the imagination itself, questioning what role it plays in both our fascinations with and repulsion from a national history of racial and sexual violence. The personal and political crash into one language here, gothic as it is supple, meditating on visual art and myth, to desire, the practice of lynching and Hurricane Katrina. Always at its center, though, is the poet himself - confessing a double song of pleasure and inevitable pain.
About the Author
Rickey Laurentiis was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is the recipient of a 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, a 2013 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 2014 traveling fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy. His work appears widely.
