2022 WINNER OF THE GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY Eschewing series and performative typography, Douglas Kearney’s Sho aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks. Navigating the complex penetrability of language, these poems are sonic in their espousal of Black vernacular traditions, while examining histories, pop culture, myth, and folklore. Both dazzling and devastating, Sho is a genius work of literary precision, wordplay, farce, and critical irony. In his “stove-like imagination,” Kearney has concocted poems that destabilize the spectacle, leaving looky-loos with an important uncertainty about the intersection between violence and entertainment. "Always playful, forever in dialogue, Kearney’s poems come at being from all sides. This book is the crowning achievement of Kearney’s body of work to date."—Judges' citation, Griffin Poetry Award I think the book is anti-spectacle. It is asking the reader to see, to really see (not for show), and to reckon with the atrocities of our time. All the while, Kearney’s language is always new, is always about possibility and expansion, and always dazzling.—Victoria Chang, LARB "Throughout Buck Studies a polyphonic diction pulls history apart, recombining it to reveal an alternative less whitewashed by enfranchised power."― BOMB "By way of these devices, which reveal a kind of double-jointed literacy, Kearney provides simultaneously masochistic and tongue-in-cheek critiques of his work as a poet, his politics, and his poetry."―starred review, Publishers Weekly “[Douglas Kearney] is at the other end of the century, using a multicultural voice inflected with the concerns of what it means to be a young black man at this time and at this place.”― Los Angeles Times Douglas Kearney has published six collections, including Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, and the California Book Award silver medal (Poetry). M. NourbeSe Philip calls Kearney’s collection of libretti, Someone Took They Tongues. (Subito, 2016), “a seismic, polyphonic mash-up.” Kearney’s Mess and Mess And (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection that Publisher’s Weekly called “an extraordinary book.” He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities and lives in St. Paul with his family. WELTER In the U.S., news broke regarding the discovery of a mass grave of Rohingya Muslim s at a human trafficking camp the same day as the first Mayweather-Pacquiao welterweight championship bout. Sic on it, cameras: queasy-green lush rush canopy―tilt down: thick bamboo cover twine-bound―tilt down: welter, dirt’s got rags to gag up, hijab stuck in dun incisors―zoom in and rack: what’s that flesh there, bone there bindled in cured skin―presence: fowl traffic, twittering pittas, bulbuls up-ruffed, hum flies, flies plump as beans, boon the snowy-browed, rufous-chested singsong, jungle jangle―cut: their throats, rufous, that was months and was that months ago, the camp boomed―boom: get the boomed shotgun mic out the shot, clean―cut: there’re too many damn birds, dirty―cut: we can’t use this―wrap: swelter, late, wait, later―fight woot fight’s tonight woot of the century tonight woot weight: welters