Poetry

A renowned poet's artful collection is a striking body of work

The New Yorker, The Best Books of Poetry of 2016
New York Times, Critics Pick
Boston Globe, Best Books listing
Miami Herald, Best LGBTQ Books
San Francisco Chronicle, Top 100 Books of the Year
Library Journal, Best Books of 2016

"There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong's sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things."-New York Times

"From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion."--New Yorker

"Extraordinary."--Los Angeles Times

"Ecstatic, bawdy, haunted, and brilliant with the pressures of its arrival."--Boston Globe

Ocean Vuong's first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial "big"--and very human--subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant."

Torso of Air

Suppose you do change your life.
& the body is more than
a portion of night--sealed
with bruises. Suppose you woke
& found your shadow replaced
by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful
& gone. So you take the knife to the wall
instead. You carve & carve
until a coin of light appears
& you get to look in, at last,
on happiness. The eye
staring back from the other side--
Waiting.

Poetry collection by Beth Brown Preston. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Adanna, African American Review, Atticus Review, Birmingham Arts Journal, The Black Scholar, Callaloo, Calyx, Cave Wall, Euphony Journal, Evening Street Review, Free State Review, Hanging Loose, Helix, Illuminations, Muse, Obsidian, Oyster River Pages, Passenger, Pennsylvania Review, Pensive, Potomac Review, Rain Taxi, Seneca Review, Sinister Wisdom, Storm Cellar, Talking River Review, That Literary Review, Vox Populi and numerous other literary and scholarly journals.

"Punks is utterly brilliant ... Keene's masterfully inventive inquiry of self and history is queered, Blackened and joyously thick with multitudes of voice and valence." --Tyehimba Jess

A landmark collection of poetry by acclaimed fiction writer, translator and MacArthur Fellow John Keene, Punks: New & Selected Poems is a generous treasury in seven sections that spans decades and includes previously unpublished and brand new work. With depth and breadth, Punks weaves together historic narratives of loss, lust, and love. The many voices that emerge in these poems--from historic Black personalities, both familial and famous, to the poet's friends and lovers in gay bars and bedrooms--form a cast of characters capable of addressing desire, oppression, AIDS and grief through sorrowful songs that "we sing as hard as we live." At home in countless poetic forms, Punks reconfirms John Keene as one of the most important voices in contemporary poetry. This collection was the 2022 winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay poetry and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry.
John Keene (born 1965) was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018. In 1989, Keene joined the Dark Room Writers Collective, and is a Graduate Fellow of the Cave Canem Writers Workshops. He is the author of Annotations and Counternarratives, both published by New Directions, as well as several other works: including the poetry collection Seismosis, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst's novel Letters from a Seducer. Keene is the recipient of many awards including the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Whiting Foundation Prize, the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the American Book Award. He teaches at Rutgers University-Newark.