Justin Phillip Reed
“Crisis, in a sense, refers to a decisive point in the progress of a disease. If I should say a poem functions "critically," I probably mean that it holds skin-splitting as an aspiration, foremost, that it means to leave a mess that is an opportunity to better know what I'm made of. I am self, "vain com-plexity," a reticent survival response to cohabitation anxiety and social stimuli. I look for poems to be rug-rufflers, to creep under that ivy of self.”
“A f*cking good time!”
“Building, its lyric moves from baroque density to unraveling flight, bespeaking the urgency of our moment, the cruel bluntness of fascism, and its entrenchment in the foundational horror of national belonging, with its accompanying exclusions. ‘Is it like a life,’ this malevolence we endure? 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 is apocalyptic”
“Reed blends intersectional politics and bodily hunger in precise, thorny language.”
“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.”
“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 . . .”
“Raw, nervy, reverberant, densely packed language whose import simply can’t be reduced to easy explanation . . . One-of-a-kind brilliant.”
Justin Phillip Reed is an American writer and amateur bass guitarist. He is author of the hybrid text, With Bloom Upon Them and Also With Blood: A Horror Miscellany (Coffee House Press), released on Halloween 2023, as well as two poetry collections,The Malevolent Volume (Coffee House Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, and Indecency (Coffee House Press, 2018) winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. His preoccupations include horror cinema, ideological failure, and uses of the grotesque. His work appears in African American Review, Best American Essays, Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, Obsidian, and elsewhere.
In an lecture entitled “Blacula still a cop film,” Reed reflected on advice-giving: “I've written things in the last five years that I no longer believe. As a young poet so defined, I'm coming to problematize advice, which-as long as poet remains a category of employment or professional vocation-is career advice. As a young poet, I suspect that Black poetry in the realm of professional writing is having what I'm only comfortable calling an "experience" among late-capitalist fashions of the prerevolutionary debacle that is the United States of America.”
Born and raised in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, he participates in alternative rock music cultures, ogles Toyota Tacomas, and enjoys smelling like outside. He writes for the Nu Metal Agenda, and his favorite band is Oklahoma City’s Chat Pile.He holds a BA in creative writing from Tusculum College and an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis.
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