Douglas Kearney

Douglas Kearney has published six books, most recently, Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry). BOMB says: “[Buck Studies] remaps the 20th century in a project that is both lyrical and epic, personal and historical.” M. NourbeSe Philip calls Kearney’s collection of libretti, Someone Took They Tongues. (Subito, 2016), “a seismic, polyphonic mash-up that disturbs the tongue.” Kearney’s collection of writing on poetics and performativity, Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection that Publisher’s Weekly called “an extraordinary book.” Starts Spinning (Rain Taxi), a chapbook of poetry, saw publication in 2019. His work is widely anthologized, including Best American Poetry (2014, 2015), Best American Experimental Writing (2014), The Creative Critic: Writing As/About Practice, What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America, and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. He is also widely published in magazines and journals, including Poetry, Callaloo, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, Jacket2, and Lana Turner. His work has been exhibited at the American Jazz Museum, Temple Contemporary, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and The Visitor’s Welcome Center (Los Angeles). A librettist, Kearney has had four operas staged, most recently Sweet Land, which received rave reviews from The LA Times, The NY Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The LA Weekly. He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. A Howard University and CalArts alum, Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. Born in Brooklyn, raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in St. Paul.


All Books

Patter

Douglas Kearney

Publication Date: March 1, 2014

$17.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 978-1-59709-580-8

Description:

For a couple struggling with infertility, conception is a war against their bodies. Blood and death attend. But when the war is won, and life stares, hungry, in the parents’ faces, where does that violence, anxiety, and shame go? The poems in Patter re-imagine miscarriages as minstrel shows, magic tricks, and comic strips; set Darth Vader against Oedipus’s dad in competition for “Father of the Year;” and interrogate the poet’s family’s stint on reality TV. In this, his third collection, award-winning poet Douglas Kearney doggedly worries the line between love and hate, showing how it bleeds itself into “fatherhood.”

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Where, oh where would we be without the dynamic intelligence and feats of lyric daring that Douglas Kearney’s work has delivered to American poetry? The poems in Patter run back and forth through the realms of private interiority, popular culture, and the vast public arena of history, all the while re-inventing what the poetic line is capable of bearing and baring. Completely and un-ironically alive with genuine feeling, these are poems that are not afraid to say and show how we matter to one another.”—Tracy K. Smith

“Because bodies matter, name, beget and conceive, Douglas Kearney’s Patter exists within the stall, the break, the miscarriage in bodies bothered by history, blood and breath. What is it to father the inchoate and the ineffable that exists in the life of the black family? Kearney’s exquisite poems dissolve our sight, force us to speak aloud, and compel us to hunt and find within the illogic logic of our lives. Patter is its own genius music—revolutionary, intimate and everyone’s.”—Claudia Rankine

Fear, Some

Douglas Kearney

Publication Date: November 1, 2006

$17.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 978-1-59709-071-1

Description:

Stealing tropes from militancy to minstrelsy, Fear, some broadcasts from the slippery moments when personal, national, racial and aesthetic anxieties overlap. These poems seek to pressurize content (“At the Pink Teacup”), language (“Atomic Buckdance”) and form (the Blaxploitation epic-remix, “(dig!) Bloom is Boom, Sucka!”) until they evoke suspicion, tension, fear and the laughter that rattles after the horrifyingly ridiculous.

News

Douglas Kearney interviewed on Commonplace Podcast!

‎Dear Listener, For this, our 99th episode, Rachel welcomes poet, interdisciplinary artist, and professor Douglas Kearney to Commonplace. This conversation, recorded in early November 2021, has been a long time […]

Keith Flynn interviewed for Citizen Times!

Renowned Madison County author, poet and multihyphenate Keith Flynn recently published his latest book, the product of more than eight years worth of interviews.  Keith Flynn’s “Prosperity Gospel: The Portraits […]

Aimee Liu featured in the Los Angeles Times!

The second dose was supposed to be my reunion pass. Thanks to COVID-19, I couldn’t get back to Connecticut for my mother’s 100th birthday at Christmastime, but once we were […]

AFTER RUBÉN featured in UK Morning Star Online

My list of the best Latinx poetry published this year includes After Ruben (Red Hen Press), a stunning collection of poems by Francisco Aragon, inspired by another of Latin America’s greatest poets […]

Keith Flynn featured on Poetry at the Dalí

Join us on YouTube for this special streaming installment of our Poetry at The Dalí series. Poetry at The Dalí is an ongoing series hosted by St. Petersburg Poet Laureate, Helen Wallace. Occurring on […]

19 Books by Hispanic Authors

If you’re looking for some new books to dive into while you’re stuck at home, then you might want to consider some of the many great books by Hispanic authors. […]

Hoopla: July Riveting Reads

Hoopla featured Aimee Liu’s Glorious Boy on their list of Riveting Reads for July 2020. Find the entire list here.

Read Your Way Around the World

With travel plans cancelled for the foreseeable future, we’re all looking for new ways to feel transported from our homes, without putting our families at risk. That’s where these book […]

Author2Author with Aimee Liu

Bill welcomes novelist, essayist, and teacher Aimee Liu to the show. Aimee is the author of numerous bestselling novels as well as nonfiction books on medical and psychological topics. Her […]

The Booklist Reader: Glorious Boy

Liu’s eponymous “glorious boy” exists at the intersection of families, communities, countries, cultures—and, for a while, life and death. His spirited, adventurous parents—Shep, a British doctor obsessed with the healing […]

PSA: Francisco Aragón “1985”

1985 Long and black, the streaksof gray, aflutter in the lightwind as she prepares to tell her story at the Federal Building:reaching into a tattered sackshe pulls out a doll […]

Chapter 16: The Skin of Meaning excerpt

The Skin of Meaning He was late to the party and without directions,though his invitation was secure, and his instinctskeenly honed to an acceptable edge, and as we arewaiting to […]

Ms. Magazine Poetry for the Rest of Us: 2020 Roundup

The Feminist Know-It-All: You know her. You can’t stand her. Good thing she’s not here! Instead, this column by gender and women’s studies librarian Karla Strand will amplify stories of the creation, access, use and […]

Douglas Kearney is a California Book Award Finalist!

Yesterday, The Commonwealth Club announced the finalists of this year's California Book Awards, and we are delighted that Douglas Kearney's poetry collection, Patter, is a finalist for the poetry award! […]

Reviews

GLORIOUS BOY by Aimee Liu reviewed by La viduité

Decode the savagery of silence, the language of separation and guilt, also deceive that of the enemy. A rather classic novel in its form, in its informed reconstruction of a little-known […]

BODY OF RENDER by Felicia Zamora reviewed in Booklist!

There is a jagged urgency to award-winning and CantoMundo Fellow Zamor’s sixth book. The opening section, “At the Hand of Other,” consists of 30 one-stanza poems that each lean toward memory and immediacy while the poet […]

A Point of Change

Aimee Liu’s Glorious Boy gives readers a portrait of a young mother and fledgling anthropologist caught in a remote outpost in the midst of World War Two. Two of Liu’s three previous […]

RHINO: reviews After Rubén

In the essay that caps his latest poetry collection, After Rubén, Francisco Aragón traces his relationship with the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916). From the initial gift of a handful […]

Writers’ Voices: Aimee Liu Sets

In the South Asian archipelago known as the Andaman Islands, aboriginal tribes thrived for 60,000 years before the onset of British colonialism nearly wiped them out. Best selling novelist Aimee […]

Kenyon Review: After Rubén

A champion of contemporary Latinx poetry, Francisco Aragón returns with his third collection, After Rubén (Red Hen Press). A scholar, translator, and the son of Nicaraguan immigrants, Aragón draws inspiration from the life […]

Historical Novel Society: Glorious Boy

1942: Clair and Shep Durant, along with their mute four-year-old son, Ty, wait for evacuation to India before the imminent Japanese invasion of the remote Andaman Islands. Shep, a doctor, […]

Seattle Book Review: Glorious Boy

Bound by ambition and a sense of adventure, Claire and Shep Durant journey to the Andaman Islands, a remote part of colonial India, in 1936. They dive deep into their […]

Asian Review of Books: Glorious Boy by Aimee Liu

Channeling some past classics also skeptical of the colonial enterprise, Glorious Boy stands out from the crowded shelves of World War II literature by immersing the reader in one of the remoter […]

Library Journal: Glorious Boy starred review

Liu’s eponymous “glorious boy” exists at the intersection of families, communities, countries, cultures—and, for a while, life and death. His spirited, adventurous parents—Shep, a British doctor obsessed with the healing […]