Douglas Kearney Selected Works

Eschewing 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 work of literary precision, wordplay, farce, and critical irony. 

Douglas Kearney! Live in LA! A thrilling poet performs works from his National Poetry Series winning book The Black Automaton. "Floodsongs," "The Voltron Communiques,: and more. The between-poem patter alone is worth the price of admission. An audio CD recorded live.

Dynamic poet, performer, librettist, and professor Douglas Kearney's works speak to those who are listening to what our living, material language has to say about race and history. At the hub of Buck Studies is a long mash-up of the stories of Herakles, the Greek bad-man, and that of Stagger Lee, the black bad-man. "Stagger Put Work In" examines the Twelve Labors Herakles performed to atone for murdering his family through Stagger Lee's murder of black man Billy Lyons. What is enacted by this appropriation is an exhaustion of forms—gangsta rap and its antecedent, the murder ballad.

only good one dead one we scold our mirror. should've been dead
before Stagger wrassled it bull-headed red-blind muscle-a-muscle.
bully and bull stagger the city levee round round round.

Douglas Kearney writes, "If my writing makes a mess of things, it's not to flee understanding, but to map (mis-)understanding as a verb."

The map's guide is Mess and Mess and, in which Kearney defines the terms that member his poetics, taking even prefixes as a call for semantic inquiry. Within are essays that explore "the Negrotesque," gloss specific poems and poetry collections, the inspirations (from life, literature, and otherwise) he drew upon when putting his pen to the page—as well as studies and drafts from his journals. Simultaneously playful and cutting, Kearney's collection interrogates that which inspires, troubles, and recurs in his work, the mess(es) there.