Indecency

Title:

Indecency

Author:

Reed, Justin Phillip author.

ISBN:

9781566895149

Personal Author:

Reed, Justin Phillip author.

Uniform Title:

Poems. Selections

Physical Description:

70 pages ; 23 cm

BISAC Subject:

Poetry

Available:*

Format	Library	Call Number	Status
Book	Searching... Main Library	811.6 Ree	Searching... Unknown

Winner of the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry

Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful--the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.

Author Notes

Justin Phillip Reed was born and raised in South Carolina. His work appears in African American Review , Best American Essays , Callaloo , the Kenyon Review , Obsidian , and elsewhere. He received an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. The author of the chapbook A History of Flamboyance (YesYes Books, 2016), he has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Conversation Literary Festival. He lives in St. Louis.

Reviews (1)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Reed's visceral and teasingly cerebral debut probes black identity, sexuality, and violence and is inseparably personal and political. He displays a searing sense of injustice about dehumanizing systems, and his speakers evoke the quotidian with formidable eloquence: "from another little death sleep I rise to find/ the id well hidden and life's slow states of/ matter still in place." These impulses meet in Reed's delight in sound and symbol, as when a speaker treats a stomachache with "ginger-mint tea in the/ inauguration memorabilia mug from Momma,/ monument-white but for Obama." Reed startles with his renderings of oppressive institutional spaces ("You arrive at the university and stand out like a necrotic thumb"), while his poem "The Day ______ Died" operates both as a brilliant rebuke to Frank O'Hara's famous elegy and as widely applicable commentary on ongoing genocide: "i disavowed 'died' but didn't mutter 'murdered' in the direction of anyone who uttered it." Reed's voice is engaging and vulnerable; in "To Every Faggot Who Pulverized Me For Being a Faggot," the speaker tempers his accusations with the admission that "What you don't know is/ I needed someone like you but braver." Abundantly brave, Reed's debut finds language as "a body behaving// as will any dialect, lifting stranger and more/ urgent mouths to the same sentence." (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Performing a Warped Masculinity en Route to the Metro	p. 1
Witness to the Woman I Am Not	p. 2
Pushing up onto its elbows, the fable lifts itself into fact	p. 6
Nothing Was Ever itself Only	p. 8
Take It Out of the Boy	p. 9
Any Unkindness	p. 10
Portrait with Stiff Upper Lip	p. 11
Slough	p. 12
Anesthesia Is a Country You Leave for America	p. 13
The Day _____ Died	p. 15
Gateway	p. 16
About a White City	p. 18
A Statement from No One, Incorporated	p. 25
The Requital	p. 27
Snowfall Throws Its Pretty Noise upon a Weary Sameness	p. 28
How to Keep It Down / Throw It Off / Defer until Asleep	p. 29
On Being a Grid One Might Go Off Of	p. 31
Retrograde	p. 32
Untitled (We aint even posed to be here)	p. 33
Porch Smoke: An Implication in Three Acts	p. 34
I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel	p. 37
On Self-Reliance	p. 38
Consent	p. 39
Exit Hex	p. 40
Orientation	p. 41
Necessary Room	p. 42
To Every Faggot Who Pulverized Me for Being a Faggot	p. 43
Black Can Sleep	p. 45
On Life as an Exercise in Preparing to Die	p. 46
Carolina Prayer	p. 47
Exchange	p. 48
The Leak in This Old Building	p. 51
The Fratricide	p. 52
Theory for Expansion	p. 54
They Speak of the Body and One Sits Up Straight	p. 55
A Victim Dissolves into Tears	p. 56
Paroxysm	p. 58
Notes	p. 69

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Reviews (1)

Publisher's Weekly Review

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