Description: Poems that represent "a chronicle of melancholy, a reaction to the monotony of racism. [They] concern loneliness, fear, fatigue, rage, and love; they hold fatherhood held against the vulnerability of the black male body, aging, and urban decay"--Publisher marketing.
Review Quotes: There are countless models of black masculinity in America. Some are enshrined in pop culture while others collect dust in the archives of ivory towers. With Imperial Liquor, his third poetry collection, Amaud Jamaul Johnson arranges them, the familiar and the forgotten, with intense lyricism and formal dexterity, and in figures that lay bare the culture at America's core as well as the genius that produces it. Johnson is a crowd-pleaser, a hole-card-reader, a social critic and consummate chronicler of the Rap Age. He's got your number, don't sleep. You've got to peep this hustle, and delight.--Gregory Pardlo