Indecency [Paperback]

Winner of the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry

Indecencyis boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightfulthe author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.Justin Phillip Reed was born and raised in South Carolina. His work appears inAfrican American Review,Best American Essays,Callaloo, theKenyon Review,Obsidian, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. The author of the chapbookA History of Flamboyance(YesYes Books, 2016), he has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Conversation Literary Festival. He lives in St. Louis.Intricate, intimate, difficult, and confrontational poems that push at the boundaries of selfhood, skin, culture, sexuality, and blood.In the vein ofPrelude to Bruisebut more inventive, more experimental, and engages more broadly and cerebrally with small moments in time that turn into bigger commentaries.
Justin has an established following (he brought the house down at the first Prince poetry reading that was held at an AWP a few years ago) and is part of the same cohort of poets as Hieu Minh Nguyen, so we should be able to promote both together and easily draw attention to his dynamic, deeply engaged poetic presence.
These poems are a perfect fit for our listwork that's as serious artistically as it is politically. Formal interest strengthens the poetry's argument, and vice versa
Justin lives in St. Louis and much of this book was written in the aftermath of Michael Brown's killing and during the attenl3œ