An examination of a brutal America through the voices of its most vulnerable sons. In his debut collection, Tommye Blount orchestrates a chorus of distinct voices that speak to the experience of the black, queer body as a site of desire and violence.
Blount is, among other things, a poet of image. His images are exciting, unique, and often deepened or complicated through repetition both within individual poems and across the collection ... At large, Blount’s poems dredge these particular moments of a personal history while reaching across and intersecting with the larger scope of American history ... 'I am a poet after all,' Blount writes in the prologue, and he proves this in image after image — each more precise and revealing, in the way a police cruiser’s light, or a stage’s light, or the spangling of a multitude of stars can reveal.
Blount’s lyrics seem to live outside space and time, blending references to history, art, and contemporary concerns into expanding galaxies on the page ... Blount is also an ekphrastic poet of the highest degree ... A captivating, unrelenting collection of poetry composed of sharp-edged truths and beautiful complexities.
... searing ... magnetic and controlled. Through charged words, masterful line breaks, and ekphrasis and persona pieces, these poems blur the line between intimacy and violence ... Blount memorably and viscerally explores the intersection of power, sexuality, and race.
