Indecency

Intricate, intimate, difficult, and confrontational poems that push at the boundaries of selfhood, skin, culture, sexuality, and blood.

Indecency is 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 insightful—the 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.

Publication date: May 8, 2018

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 112 pages

ISBN: 9781566895149

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Justin Phillip Reed is an American poet living in St. Louis. His work appears in African American Review, Best American Essays, Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, Obsidian, and elsewhere. He holds a BA in creative writing from Tusculum College and an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. The author of the chapbook A History of Flamboyance (YesYes Books 2016), he has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Conversation Literary Festival. Reed currently organizes the St. Louis community-based poetry workshop series Most Folks At Work. He was born and raised in South Carolina.

Winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Poetry 

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry

Finalist for the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award

A BCALA 2019 Honor Best Poetry Award winner

A Library Journal Best Book of 2018

“[Reed’s] poems take up the body in desire and violence, and they do so by thrusting the reader into a stark visceral encounter with their material.”

—The New York Times

“Raw, nervy, reverberant, densely packed language whose import simply can’t be reduced to easy explanation . . . One-of-a-kind brilliant.”

—Library Journal

“[A] visceral and teasingly cerebral debut.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Reed’s poems are formally inventive, especially when he works in concrete ways on the page. . . . The reader winds up in a new place without realizing they were being moved there.” 

—The Rumpus

“A poignant, searing book.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Rich with musical echoes and sonic ironies.”

—Vulture

“Reed wrestles with finding the language to convey the pain of that double oppression and still manages to create terrible beauty.”

—Signature

“In his debut poetry collection, Indecency, [Reed] wrestles with self-perception, intimacy, and placement.”

—St. Louis Magazine

“An unflinching exploration of power, race, sexuality, gender, the personal and the political.”

—Vox

“Reed’s deft craft is so rare, so precise, and driven by language whose surface is texture like teeth, that it seems like freed speech into the ache of repressive histories, white gazes, and uninvited invasions. . . . Indecency is the new duende. It is like no other book I’ve read; Reed is an extraordinary talent.”

—Dawn Lundy Martin

“Indecency is a refusal of pretense, a celebration of possibilities within human complexity—and the hard-earned freedom inextricable from the public and private histories from which it is wrought.”

—Khadijah Queen

“Don’t avert: Justin Phillip Reed demands we witness that who’s missing was taken, who fell was dropped, and who died was murdered. . . .Fuck what they claim; here’s what Reed has seen.”

—Douglas Kearney