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About Indecency
Product Description Winner of the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful―the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us. Review Winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Poetry Finalist for the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery AwardFinalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay PoetryBCALA 2019 Honor Best Poetry Award winnerLibrary Journal, “Best Books 2018”“Reed’s visceral and teasingly cerebral debut probes black identity, sexuality, and violence and is inseparably personal and political. He displays a searing sense of injustice about dehumanizing systems, and his speakers evoke the quotidian with formidable eloquence . . .” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “[Reed’s] poems take up the body in desire and violence, and they do so by thrusting the reader into a stark visceral encounter with their material.” —The New York Times“Raw, nervy, reverberant, densely packed language whose import simply can’t be reduced to easy explanation . . . One-of-a-kind brilliant.” —Library Journal“Indecency made me stand up and applaud.” —The Millions“Reed’s poems are formally inventive, especially when he works in concrete ways on the page. . . . The reader winds up in a new place without realizing they were being moved there.” —The Rumpus “A poignant, searing book.” —Entertainment Weekly “Rich with musical echoes and sonic ironies.” —Vulture“Reed’s wit and formal experimentation, quicksilver and luminous, shows the world as it is, while detailing how the very people that society most devalues, demeans, and seeks to destroy are its true visionaries.” —The Adroit Journal“Reed wrestles with finding the language to convey the pain of that double oppression and still manages to create terrible beauty.” —Signature “Reed’s love of language is ever-present in his joyful play with words throughout his poetry.” —The Root“In his debut poetry collection, Indecency, [Reed] wrestles with self-perception, intimacy, and placement.” —St. Louis Magazine“An unflinching exploration of power, race, sexuality, gender, the personal and the political.” —Vox “Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful―the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.” —The Rumpus “As we grapple with issues of equity and inclusion, insights that Reed invokes are essential. They expose a treacherous legacy, an inheritance we all must own.” —The Manitou Messenger“Within the containment of mostly invented forms, Justin Phillip Reed’s Indecency is the ‘carnal weight’ I’ve longed for in poetry. It’s the guttural dream of utterance that strokes and pokes the body. Reed’s deft craft is so rare, so precise, and driven by language whose surface is texture like teeth, that it seems like freed speech into the ache of repressive histories, white gazes, and uninvited invasions. Violence in Reed’s hands is no longer a thing somewhere out there but is inside the heart, as close as any black desire. Indecency is the new duende. It is like no other book I’ve read; Reed is an extraordinary talent.” —Dawn Lundy Martin“In this gorgeous first collection, there is no separation of sound from the language it travels in, from the body that produces it, from the experience that evokes it. Justin Phillip Reed achieves an impressive unity of form and content, never obscuring meaning in its varied violences inside the poems’ luxuriant unfolding—the ‘absent-present’ rich with tough p
