Description

Beacon Press, paperback

Publication Date: March 25, 2025

Publisher Marketing: 51 achingly eloquent poems from a young Cave Canem fellow: W. J. Lofton’s verses explore Black queer Southern identity, grief, love, and intimacy while enduring and witnessing unfreedom in America W. J. Lofton writes vivid, accessible poems that channel the energy, urgency, ambitions, joys, and sorrows of a young Black queer artist. They are about love and flirtation, sweet tea and hot sauce, God and family, life and death, police brutality and extrajudicial killings. His verses honor some of the young lives extinguished by these killingsBreonna Taylor, Kendrick Johnson, Ahmaud Arbery. He also pays tribute to some of the towering figures of Black culture who have come before himRichard Pryor, Assata Shakur. His style is endlessly propulsive, informed by some of the Harlem Renaissance greatsLangston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooksbut also transforming that rich tradition for the present day.