With Bloom Upon Them and Also with Blood

Justin Phillip Reed is an American writer and amateur bass guitarist. His preoccupations include horror cinema, ideological failure, and uses of the grotesque. He is author of two poetry collections, The Malevolent Volume (2020) and Indecency (2018), published by Coffee House Press. Born and raised in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, he participates in alternative rock music cultures and enjoys smelling like outside.

Praise for The Malevolent VolumeWinner of the 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award for PoetryA The Washington Post Best Poetry Collection of 2020An NPR Favorite Book of 2020A New York Times New and Noteworthy BookA Buzzfeed Most Anticipated Title of 2020A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2020“Reed blends intersectional politics and bodily hunger in precise, thorny language.” —The New York Times“Reminds us that poetry can be playful and deadly serious in the same moment. . . [Reed] piles on anxious images and quasi-logical connections to create a gratifying weirdness.” —Troy Jollimore, The Washington Post“In The Malevolent Volume, Justin Phillip Reed offers multiple realities and their consequences. Challenging our thinking, these poems consider the uses of horror: through the page, we experience what it's like to be both haunted and that which haunts. . . Justin Phillip Reed has written a book that beckons us to reread as we seek to understand our time, how much of it is promissory and how much apocalyptic.” —Judges' citation, 2021 Firecracker Award in Poetry“Magnificent. . . The gorgeous precision of the poems refuse to perform for the white gaze—they snatch back blackness from being used as a trope, crafting instead a new canon.” —Erin Adair-Hodges, St. Louis Post-Dispatch“How Reed found a way to write a book as fanged and fabulous and complexly musical as this one right after his National Book Award-winning debut, Indecency, is a mystery, but one thing’s clear now: he’s here to stay.” —John Freeman, Literary Hub“A tour-de-force featuring a striking voice and artistry that will dazzle the vision, stun the ear, and demand attention. . . . [Reed] is conducting a literary chemical experiment that brings forward a new element with a long half-life, far past the ending of this collection.” —Mandana Chaffa, Jacket2“A poetry collection of extraordinary range, chameleonic and sure-handed in its embrace of form, yet without being formalistic or formulaic. . . . Each title suggests the plunge in this poet's quest to torment us with stinging, hard-won compassion and merciless self-exploration, stages as mythos, awaiting the reader who braves the labyrinth. A marvel of construction, it is a good place to get lost.” —Herman Van den Reech, Caesura“The Malevolent Volume takes us on a trip through a world that is familiar but slightly askew, as if one were walking through a haze or looking into a funhouse mirror. . . . Reed’s poems know perfectly well how to make their reader stop and listen.” —Margaryta Golovchenko, The Town Crier“I’d quote a few of the breathtaking detonations across this incredible collection if there weren’t so many. On every page the intimacies of mind and body, myth and memory are simultaneously sung and said. It’s not quite enough to salute the literary ties and tangles, the range and urgency of subjects, the layered lyric linguistics. The Malevolent Volume is roundly astounding. Reed is making a new and wholly irreducible line through the waters of American poetry.” —Terrance Hayes“‘Its trumpets, they will ramify.’ Deliberate in its every movement, this collection is a most satisfying force of will. Justin Phillip Reed’s follow-up, The Malevolent Volume, is a masterpiece to which I will ‘be always arriving.’ If our work as poets is to transform what most would call violence and what beasts accept as natural, this is a blueprint for how to do so ethically and masterfully. Here, in word, is a guttural and gutting music. Every poem becomes a new and necessary etymology of ‘malevolent.’ The beast in me bows to the beast in you, Justin. This is a restorative Black eco-poetics; where afropessimism meets afrofuturism.” —Marwa Helal"Horror is a genre of encounters not with the unknown, but with what is most familiar—and therefore most unshakeable. If it is a monstrous language that Justin Phillip Reed employs in The Malevolent Volume, it’s a monster you already know well. Reed is a master of many things—meter, momentum, lexical richness, the musculature of syntax, how to haunt an insistently violent canon—but perhaps chief among them is the dark magic of harnessing language’s wilds into something that blooms into a real shout inside you. You must understand: it’s not strangeness you’re seeing here. It is audacity—the audacity of the queer, Black body, the brilliant body, which won’t, and won’t, and won’t die.” —Franny Choi