Rickey Laurentiis

Winner of the 2016 Levis Reading Prize Winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize Finalist for the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award Rickey Luarentiis is a winner of a 2018 Whiting Writers Prize In a landscape at once the brutal American South as it is the brutal mind, Boy with Thorn interrogates the genesis of all poetic creation—the imagination itself, questioning what role it plays in both our fascinations with and repulsion from a national history of racial and sexual violence. The personal and political crash into one language here, gothic as it is supple, meditating on visual art and myth, to desire, the practice of lynching and Hurricane Katrina. Always at its center, though, is the poet himself—confessing a double song of pleasure and inevitable pain.

Boy with Thorn

Saeed Jones

Phillip B. Williams

Darrel Alejandro Holnes

L. Lamar Wilson

Poems and conversations by men in the black, queer literary community, sparked into existence by a Best American Poetry blog from Jericho Brown in which he singled out some of the most exciting young, black, and gay men writing today ... features poems by and dialogue between poets Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Saeed Jones, Rickey Laurentiis, Phillip B. Williams, and L. Lamar Wilson.

Rickey Laurentiis

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