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.

Optic Subwoof is a collection of talks that poet and National Book Award finalist Douglas Kearney presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2020 and 2021. As kinetic on the page as they are in person, these lectures offer an urgent critique of the intersections between violence and entertainment, interrogating the ways in which poetry, humor, visual art, music, pop culture, and performance alternately uphold and subvert this violence. With genius precision and an avant-garde sensibility, Kearney examines the nuances around Black visibility and its aestheticization. In myriad ways, Optic Subwoof is a book that establishes Kearney as one of the most dynamic writers and thinkers of the twenty-first century.

Stealing tropes from militancy to minstrelsy, Fear, some broadcasts from the slippery moments when personal, national, racial and aesthetic anxieties overlap. These poems seek to pressurize content ("At the Pink Teacup"), language ("Atomic Buckdance") and form (the Blaxploitation epic-remix, "(dig) Bloom is Boom, Sucka!") until they evoke suspicion, tension, fear and the laughter that rattles after the horrifyingly ridiculous.

From ambivalent animals thriving after Katrina to party chants echoing in a burning city, The Black Automaton troubles rubble, cobbling a kind of life. In this collection, bodies at risk seek renewal through violence and fertility, history and myth, flesh and radios.

These poems look at what life is like for a young black man today.

In MESS AND MESS AND, Kearney defines the terms that member his poetics. Within are essays that explore "the Negrotesque," gloss specific poems and poetry collections, the inspirations (from life, literature, and otherwise) he drew upon when putting his pen to the page--as well as studies and drafts from his journals.

Lauren Halsey is known for her sculptures, mixed media works, and site-specific installations that remix (or, as Halsey says, “funkify”) history by combining signs, symbols, and architecture from the past, present, and future. In her new installation for The Met’s Roof Garden Commission series, she brings together ancient Egyptian–inspired iconography and sculpture with signage and texts drawn from the artist’s local community in South Central Los Angeles. Accompanied by new photography and unpublished sketches from Halsey’s studio, this compact volume contains an insightful essay by curator Abraham Thomas that examines Halsey’s artistic process and considers this installation in the context of her past work. In a revealing interview with poet Douglas Kearney, the artist discusses her diverse influences—which include ancient Egyptian relief carving, funk music, Afrofuturism, and the architecture of L.A.—and elaborates on the importance of community building and engagement in the spaces she creates.

The third book by Whiting Writers’ Award-winning poet Douglas Kearney, author of The Black Automaton, a National Poetry Series selection.

On the heels of Sho (winner, Griffin Poetry Prize) and Optic Subwoof (Pegasus Award in Poetry Criticism), Douglas Kearney's visual poetry masterpiece, I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always, pushes further into Kearney's long-time practices of performance typography, collaging pre-existing media sources to create singular, multiplicitous texts that defy neat categorization. Through AfroFuturistic exploration of these techniques, Kearney presents a sustained consideration of precarious Black subjectivity, cultural production as self-defense, the transhistoric emancipatory logics of the preposition over, Anarcho-Black temporal disruption, and seriocomic meditations on the material and metaphysical nature of shadow. Engaging a rich history of visual poetics, I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always almost predicts its endurance as a visionary work of genius.