A native New Orleanian, Karisma Price is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University. A poet and screenwriter, she is the author of I'm Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023) which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice Pick. Her work has appeared in publications including Poetry, Indiana Review, Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day Series, and elsewhere. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, was awarded the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and is the 2023 winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University.
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I'm Always So Serious: PoemsFrom"I'm Always so Serious"
The husband joins his wife near the olive
shaded lamp and quails
as his raving lover seizes the neck of
the fixture. I shudder in the passenger seat of
this city, far enough to not be heard but a light shines
bright and I am seen, sleuthing and serious. I know
close violences still form in the absence of want.
I keep walking as the husband shuts the blinds.
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I'm Always So Serious: PoemsFrom"After the 1916 Film"
I am not safe inside the vehicle nor when I reach the
tenor. Neglect, a different type of death. I mean here I
am in the center of my body leaning left over exhausting myself.
I am a life skill. I am a body who loves the mercy of
movement.
Tell me what to do specifically. I’d like some guidance.
I scare away all the punctuation
I am a sentence that is not allowed to end
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I'm Always So Serious: PoemsFrom"Prelude to Separation"
for my grandmother and her many names:
Boo Boo, Bootsy, Helen Valentine Robinson
(1924–2005)
This is the type of weather
we lose matriarchs to but don’t
yet know. We will unfurl
the rollers from her hair when we find her,
stroke the blue suede of the casket
before she is lowered into
the brownest part of the earth.
There will be no headstone.
There will be nowhere to sing.
There is something vulgar
in our freedom: months later when we
escape the city and storm
to Mississippi, we cannot bring her.
God does not slap the ground.
The audacity. He won’t break it open.
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"[R]ich with aphorism and rhetoric. . . . I’m Always So Serious reveals no shortage of injustice, and no lack of inspiration from African American literary and artistic forebears. . . . Price’s best moments—and there are many—come in ultra-quotable, soaringly general single sentences and explosive rhetorical questions.” —Stephanie Burt for The New York Times Book Review [on I'm Always So Serious]
"Karisma Price’s debut poetry collection, I'm Always So Serious, has set New Orleans buzzing with the deftness of her vision and her attention to the kind of details that show the city in a fresh way." —Maurice Carlos Ruffin, The New York Times
“Karisma Price speaks with a wink, a sigh, a knitted brow when she says she’s always so serious. She speaks as someone raised on a gumbo of James Baldwin and James Booker, Buckjumping and Brooklyn. She speaks as your phone’s autocorrect, your remixed song lyrics, your friendly neighborhood fortune teller. Price speaks directly to and for you while speaking distinctly for herself. These are the masterful portraits, mercurial testimonies, and verbal inventions of our imminent poet of the new school/south, the next generation. I’m Always So Serious is brilliant.” —Terrance Hayes, winner of the National Book Award for Lighthead
The poems of Karisma Price are songs, howls, portraits, critiques; they move nimbly between the narrative and the lyric. Price bends form and time, bringing together unexpected interlocutors to make sense of what cannot make sense—but the effort is sanctifying. Her architecture surprises; full of rhythm and light, it houses steady compassion alongside flashes of violence. The reader feels the necessity of the work and, held by Price, rises to meet it.