Douglas Kearney - Böcker

Through personal narrative, poetry, and visual art, stories of infertility that are far more nuanced than statistics, insurance diagnostic codes, and treatment plans, are brought to light. These works highlight the varied perspectives of individuals who have lived with infertility and include perspectives from women, men, and nonbinary and transgender individuals, as well as heterosexual couples, single parents by choice, and lesbian and queer-identified couples. This collection intentionally makes visible the emotional depths of infertility. From diagnosis and treatment, adoption, or living childfree, to miscarriage and pregnancy loss, editors, writers, and artists explore the range of experiences with infertility and their psychological, physical, and emotional impacts in all aspects of life. This carefully curated anthology reveals that infertility cannot be reduced to a singular narrative; instead, it is an assemblage of multiple embodied moments. Whether a reader comes to this book as someone personally affected by infertility or someone who wants to learn more about the experiences of individuals facing reproductive loss, Infertilities, A Curation invites readers to consider how creative practices such as art and writing can aid in efforts to heal individual traumas and more broadly as means of advocacy.

Stealing tropes from militancy to minstrelsy, Fear,some broadcasts from the slippery moments when personal, national, racial and aesthetic anxieties overlap. These poems seek to pressurize content ("At the Pink Teacup"), language ("Atomic Buckdance") and form (the Blaxploitation epic-remix, "(dig) Bloom is Boom, Sucka!") until they evoke suspicion, tension, fear and the laughter that rattles after the horrifyingly ridiculous.

For a couple struggling with infertility, conception is a war against their bodies. Blood and death attend. But when the war is won, and life stares, hungry, in the parents’ faces, where does that violence, anxiety, and shame go? The poems in Patter re-imagine miscarriages as minstrel shows, magic tricks, and comic strips; set Darth Vader against Oedipus’s dad in competition for “Father of the Year;” and interrogate the poet’s family’s stint on reality TV. In this, his third collection, award-winning poet Douglas Kearney doggedly worries the line between love and hate, showing how it bleeds itself into “fatherhood.”

2022 WINNER OF THE GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRYEschewing 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.

2022 WINNER OF THE GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRYEschewing 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.

Winner of the 2023 CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative NonfictionWinner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry CriticismOptic Subwoof is a collection of talks that poet and National Book Award finalist Douglas Kearney presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2020 and 2021.As kinetic on the page as they are in person, these lectures offer an urgent critique of the intersections between violence and entertainment, interrogating the ways in which poetry, humor, visual art, music, pop culture, and performance alternately uphold and subvert this violence. With genius precision and an avant-garde sensibility, Kearney examines the nuances around Black visibility and its aestheticization. In myriad ways, Optic Subwoof is a book that establishes Kearney as one of the most dynamic writers and thinkers of the twenty-first century.