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Winner of the 2018 National Book Award for 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.
Paperback Original
National Book Awards, 2018
"Starred Review. 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
"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
"Reed wrestles with finding the language to convey the pain of that double oppression and still manages to create terrible beauty." - Signature
"In his debut poetry collection, Indecency, [Reed] wrestles with self-perception, intimacy, and placement." - St. Louis Magazine
"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 phantoms and the fragile living, and underneath: an unwillingness to buckle under unwanted and unasked-for burdens. In conversation with Frank O'Hara and Dawn Lundy Martin, with Michael Brown and Ezell Ford, with Ralph Ellison and Harryette Mullen, with the named and unnamed populace who understand sufferance but also resilience, pain but also sweetness, Indecency is a refusal of pretense, a celebration of possibilities within human complexity—and the hard-earned freedom inextricable from the public and private histories from which it is wrought." - Khadijah Queen
"Don't avert: Justin Phillip Reed demands we witness that who's missing was taken, who fell was dropped, and who died was murdered. Witness, too, that who done it will claim everything but responsibility. That obscenity drives the poet to fracture language into the exquisite shrapnel of lyric paroxysms, leaves a 'body / ... deboned of its irony.' That indecency triggered these devastating poems. Fuck what they claim; here's what Reed has seen." - Douglas Kearney
"It would be a mistake, in heeding Reed's outrage and his sense of urgency (and heed it we should) to hurry past the beauty in these poems, of which there is plenty to be found: potent word play, intricate rhyme, and stray lines like 'a smeared sweet on his cheek in the parenthesis of a grin' or 'the dense streets clapped into a quick-descended stillness.'" - Assignment
This information about Indecency was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Justin Phillip Reed was born and raised in South Carolina. His work appears in African American Review, Best American Essays, Callaloo, the Kenyon Review, Obsidian, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. The author of the chapbook A History of Flamboyance (YesYes Books, 2016), he has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Conversation Literary Festival. He lives in St. Louis.
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