What excites me most about poetry right now is the fact that the mainstream has come to encompass so many kinds of poets, that many voices are now being heard loudly and broadly thanks to an engaged and expanding community of publishers and of younger and older poetry fans who pass poems around the Internet like the latest news. I want the preview, going forward, to include books that might fall outside of my particular sensibility. And so I have invited some friends and colleagues to help me.
This year s poetry preview features four poet-critics in addition to myself: Ana Božičević, Ken Chen, Evie Shockley, and Phillip B. Williams. These are poets whose work spans aesthetic, political, and emotional spectrums. They are also all brilliant and incisive critics, and together, we have curated a list of books that speak about and out of the many challenges that we have faced over the last several years though that s not to say these are not permanent and lasting books. The preview
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The title of Kearney s new collection could mean three things: a performance (show), an affirmation (sure, spoken in Black vernacular), and to appear (to show up). The book is raucous theater, a party whose rhythms contain a meditation on what it means to have a body in public space.
SHO explores Black masculinity, police killings, and Christianity, often interrogating race through the metonymy of skin. If we show our race, our seemingly most fateful attribute, on our skin, does that mean skin is actually one s interior? This is just one of the book s Zen koans, to use Kearney s characterization of his poems. A poem about Black achievement envisions his own flayed skin levitating as a kite, a macabre vision of racial uplift.