Winner of the 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry
Finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry
A Washington Post Best Poetry Collection of 2020
An NPR Favorite Book of 2020
A New York Times New and Noteworthy Book
A Buzzfeed Most Anticipated Book of 2020
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2020
“Reed blends intersectional politics and bodily hunger in precise, thorny language.”
—New York Times
“Reminds us that poetry can be playful and deadly serious in the same moment. . . . [Reed] piles on anxious images and quasi-logical connections to create a gratifying weirdness.”
—Troy Jollimore, The Washington Post
“A dextrous and epic music, this book faces down our combative and trespassed American moment. . . . Justin Phillip Reed has written a book that beckons us to reread as we seek to understand our time, how much of it is promissory and how much apocalyptic.”
—Judges' citation, 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award in Poetry
“[M]agnificent. . . . The gorgeous precision of the poems refuse to perform for the white gaze—they snatch back blackness from being used as a trope, crafting instead a new canon.”
—Erin Adair-Hodges, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Incendiary. With breathtaking lyrical dexterity, Reed first rebukes and then remakes western literature and myth, bringing Black queerness to the forefront.”
—Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, Adroit Journal
“A tour-de-force.”
—Mandana Chaffa, Jacket2
“Reed is making a new and wholly irreducible line through the waters of American poetry.”
—Terrance Hayes
“The beast in me bows to the beast in you, Justin. This is a restorative Black eco-poetics; where afropessimism meets afrofuturism.”
—Marwa Helal
“Reed is a master of many things—meter, momentum, lexical richness, the musculature of syntax, how to haunt an insistently violent canon—but perhaps chief among them is the dark magic of harnessing language’s wilds into something that blooms into a real shout inside you.”
—Franny Choi
