Description: It illuminates the ways in which we all are relegated to cells or boundaries, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.
Brief description: Randall Horton's past honors include the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and most recently a GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction for Hook: A Memoir. The author of numerous books, he is a member of the experimental performance group Heroes Are Gang Leaders, which received the 2018 American Book Award in Oral Literature. He is associate professor of English at the University of New Haven.
Review Quotes:
Randall Horton's {#289-128} is a powerful, bristling, innovative serial poem from the carceral state, the beating heart of a brilliant poet's life inside. This is life as a number, a routine, but with razor perception, elegant stride, and heightened observation of the human. 'i am not post or post-racial or post-human, i'm / color-constructed I am melanin, & perhaps we have lost our minds.' A life "hung out to dry, while hanging in the streets for back bodies'", Horton writes of torture, writs, motions denied, carnage, and family turning back collect calls. And where 'rehabilitation is love letters to a ghost.' This is one of the most essential books of poetry of this time, right now. Of 'screaming in a dark ocean, ' of waiting for release that does finally come. But poetry needs to 'bite/spit venom, and rebel rouse' radically, in or out. This book is a goad to keep by your side as the world awakens to understand its penal tragedies and advocates a visionary change. Kudos!
--Anne Waldman, author of Trickster Feminism, cofounder with Allen Ginsberg of The Jack Kerouac School, Chancellor Emeritus of The Academy of American Poets