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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.
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"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
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