2022 WINNER OF THE GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE
2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY
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 genius work of literary precision, wordplay, farce, and critical irony. In his “stove-like imagination,” Kearney has concocted poems that destabilize the spectacle, leaving looky-loos with an important uncertainty about the intersection between violence and entertainment.
"Always playful, forever in dialogue, Kearney’s poems come at being from all sides. This book is the crowning achievement of Kearney’s body of work to date."—Judges' citation, Griffin Poetry Award
I think the book is anti-spectacle. It is asking the reader to see, to really see (not for show), and to reckon with the atrocities of our time. All the while, Kearney’s language is always new, is always about possibility and expansion, and always dazzling.—Victoria Chang, LARB
- Winner of Griffin Poetry Prize 2022 (Canada)
- Winner of Minnesota Book Award 2021 (United States)
- Short-listed for National Book Award 2021 (United States)
- Short-listed for PEN/Voelcker Award 2021 (United States)
- Short-listed for Kingsley Tufts Award 2021 (United States)
ISBN: 9781950268153
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
104 pages