Description
Poetry. African & African American Studies. Winner of the Silver Medal for the 2017 California Book Award in Poetry. BUCK STUDIES is a massive informational architecture of masteries and murders: tellings and re-tellings; legends, myths, sacred and profane narratives of race and Christs and media; pornos and pastorals of who-owns-who on what island and who gets to live in these paradises and who gets to die for them. Who gets to look and who gets to buy. Douglas Kearney addresses and redresses all the language that's got away, with diagrammatic and dramatic compositions on paper, in the air and in the ear.
"Lurking below the pure alchemy in Kearney's BUCK STUDIES is a language that constantly flirts with collapse. The combination of an out-of-joint lyric with a mille-feuille of text reveals the transformative subject of the black body quelled, contained, caricatured, and dismembered. Absurdity marries intellect here while a frenetic melancholy embraces the ceaseless nature of historical despair. And yet, we still encounter humor, perverse and sprung from chaos. BUCK STUDIES is a peek behind the curtain of a brilliant mind resigned to the fact that 'the torments must go on mustn't they for the tremble tremble tremble...' if nothing else."—Ruth Ellen Kocher
Author Bio
Douglas Kearney's Patter (Red Hen Press, 2014) was a finalist for the California Book Award in Poetry. THE BLACK AUTOMATON (Fence Books, 2009) was a National Poetry Series selection. Most recently he is the author of BUCK STUDIES (Fence Books, 2016), SOMEONE TOOK THEY TONGUES (Subito Press, 2016), and MESS AND MESS AND (Noemi Press, 2015). He has received a Whiting Writer's Award and residencies/fellowships including Cave Canem and The Rauschenberg Foundation. Two of his operas, Sucktion and Crescent City, have received grants from the MAP Fund. Sucktion has been produced internationally. Crescent City premiered in Los Angeles in 2012. His work has appeared in Poetry, NOCTURNES, Iowa Review, Boston Review, What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America, Best American Poetry, and Best American Experimental Writing. Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in Santa Clarita. He teaches at CalArts, where he received his MFA in Writing (04).
Author City: SAUGUS, CA USA