Optic Subwoof - by Douglas Kearney (Paperback)

About the Book

"A book of lectures by Douglas Kearney, published in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series"--

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2023 CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction

Winner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism

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.

Review Quotes

"Kearney's prosody is miraculous.....I can't think of another writer as gifted as Kearney is at sound."--Ken Chen, NPR

"Reading Kearney's poems is like being inside of a crystal -- depending on the time of day and how the light is shining through the crystal, the poem's meaning can change. It is truly a disorienting prismatic experience."--Victoria Chang, LA Review of Books

"Kearney's exquisite poems dissolve our sight, force us to speak aloud, and compel us to hunt and find within the illogic logic of our lives. Patter is its own genius music--revolutionary, intimate, and everyone's"--Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen

About the Author

Douglas Kearney has published seven poetry collections, including Sho (Wave 2021), which is a finalist for the PEN and the National Book Award, 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 for poetry. 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.