Rickey Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Boy with Thorn, their
debut book, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and was
a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Their other honors include fellowships
from the Lannan Literary Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and
the Poetry Foundation. Currently Laurentiis lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where they
are the inaugural Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry
and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh.
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Boy with ThornPoemsFrom"Vanitas with Negro Boy"
Masters, never trust me. Listen: each day
is a Negro boy, chained, slogging out of the waves,
panting, gripping the sum of his captain, the head,
ripped off, the blood purpling down, the red
hair flossed between the knuckles, swinging it
before him like judgment, saying to the mist,
then not, then quietly only to himself, This is what
I’ll do to you, what you dream I do, sir, if you like it.
Boy with Thorn:Poems -
Boy with ThornPoemsFrom"You Are Not Christ"
For the drowning, yes, there is always panic.
Or peace. Your body behaving finally by instinct
alone. Crossing out wonder. Crossing out
a need to know. You only feel you need to live.
That you deserve it. Even here. Even as your chest
fills with a strange new air, you will not ask
what this means. Like prey caught in the wolf’s teeth,
but you are not the lamb. You are what’s in the lamb
that keeps it kicking. Let it.
Boy with Thorn:Poems
“Whether in praise songs, appraisals or meditations, the poems of Boy with Thorn embody an ardent grace. Their accomplished structures house a fearless sensitivity. Laurentiis fills history with their ‘crucial blood,’ their ‘stubbornness,’ their ‘American tongue’; and history, in return, fills him with crucial muses (from Auden to Hayden), stubborn ghosts (such as Emmett Till), and manifold expressions of culture (southern, sexual, spiritual). The result is an extraordinary, and ultimately, irreducible debut." —Terrance Hayes
“Laurentiis’ poems have the vastness of a single voice shouted into echo in a deep well, and this is why the collection seems to render more than it contains in mere information alone. Rich in subtext and musically deft, the poems please even as they parry, excite even as they incite one to consider their stakes. For this reason, the collection is owed the reading—and rereading—by poets and students of poetry both.”—Emilia Phillips, On the Seawall [on Boy with Thorn]
“. . . Their words are perfectly aimed flares; their sinuous syntax bears both fire and balm; the stories they tell are the precondition for a remapping of dream and desire. Boy with Thorn shows a mind at full speed and fearless of what it might uncover, heralding a new, true talent.”—John Keene
Rickey Laurentiis is a magician who can slow down time. Their poems are heady and sensual: their virtuosic work draws upon myth and canonical poetics to make something pioneering. They are dexterous with form, always finding the music to match their lines. From sinuous lyricism to urgent declamation, their work traces the complex relationships among power, freedom, and violence. You find yourself moving your lips as you read these poems; their sounds make beautiful and awful shapes.