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2022 WINNER OF THE GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE
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.
"Always playful, forever in dialogue, Kearney’s poems come at being from all sides. This book is the crowning achievement of Kearney’s body of work to date."—Judges' citation, Griffin Poetry Award
I think the book is anti-spectacle. It is asking the reader to see, to really see (not for show), and to reckon with the atrocities of our time. All the while, Kearney’s language is always new, is always about possibility and expansion, and always dazzling.—Victoria Chang, LARB
Douglas Kearney has published six collections, including Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, and the California Book Award silver medal (Poetry). M. NourbeSe Philip calls Kearney’s collection of libretti, Someone Took They Tongues. (Subito, 2016), “a seismic, polyphonic mash-up.” Kearney’s Mess and Mess And (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection that Publisher’s Weekly called “an extraordinary book.” He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities and lives in St. Paul with his family.
Contents
1. Come Back Striking What’s Above
Buck
Well
Property Values
Do the Backseat Jam!
Everyday (I Gets)
Black Flight
Sand Fire (or The Pool, 2016)—
…Fox!
Livestock
Promissorry Note
Dogged
Close
Borax
The Post-
Welter
Demonology
2. A Negrocious Show of Feels
Sho
Static
Do the Cruiseline-up Slowgrind-up!
Negroes Are a Fatsuit, ♥ Hollywood, USA
Just Wanna Be Like
Deformation
First, She Cuts the Stems
The Shootout
Having Drowned Our Lovers
Do the Six-Foot Jump Down!
The Drifters After School
Eulogy for a Pair of Kicks
Eulogy for an Afro Pick
Fire
“…say the magic words”
Manesology
Acknowledgments & Notes