Sho - by Douglas Kearney (Paperback)

About the Book

An experiment and experience in language, surveying the junction of violence, entertainment, race, and folklore.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

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

"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

"[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

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.