Sho

(Hardback)

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2022 WINNER OF THE GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE

2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY

Eschewing series and performative typography, Douglas Kearneys 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

"Always playful, forever in dialogue, Kearneys poems come at being from all sides. This book is the crowning achievement of Kearneys 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, Kearneys language is always new, is always about possibility and expansion, and always dazzling.Victoria Chang,LARB

Author Bio

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 Kearneys collection of libretti, Someone Took They Tongues. (Subito, 2016), a seismic, polyphonic mash-up. Kearneys Mess and Mess And (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection that Publishers Weekly called an extraordinary book. He has received a Whiting Writers 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 MinnesotaTwin Cities and lives in St. Paul with his family.