Sho

by Douglas Kearney

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781950268153
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	04/06/2021
Pages:	104
Sales rank:	541,760
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.70(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

PROPERTY VALUES

I aspire to be a cvs: Lord, I wanna be

a drugstore inna my heart—.

Or a nice neighborhood,

a rapless gas-up—

inna my heart—a “legit” “ballot”—

I perspire all night at it.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

"Throughout Buck Studies a polyphonic diction pulls history apart, recombining it to reveal an alternative less whitewashed by enfranchised power."—BOMB

"By way of these devices, which reveal a kind of double-jointed literacy, Kearney provides simultaneously masochistic and tongue-in-cheek critiques of his work as a poet, his politics, and his poetry."—starred review, Publishers Weekly

“[Douglas Kearney] is at the other end of the century, using a multicultural voice inflected with the concerns of what it means to be a young black man at this time and at this place.”—Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher