Staff Pick
These poems shine light on the realities of racial and gendered American violence both past and present, asking how to thrive as marginalized people, to flourish and fight back against the violence from the oppressors that threatens to consume the narrative. At once both loving and powerful. Recommended By Cosima C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Set against a media environment that saturates even our most intimate spaces, these poems grapple with news of violence in the United States today and in the past-in particular, violence inflicted on people of color and on transgendered people. Winner of the 2018 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award, Dispatch is poignant example of poetry's possibilities for transformation, solidarity, and renewal.
Review
"The poems...speak with poised urgency out of profound, enduring fear imposed by impossibly huge forces...and steady themselves, when steadiness seems possible, on the fact of an undiminishable self beyond language." Laura Eve Engel, poets.org
Review
"Awkward-Rich seeks his own differentiation, recognition, the perhaps impossible goal of feeling truly seen for your whole self." Stephanie Burt, LA Review of Books
Review
"In these poems of bracing clarity, national violence is unflinchingly and meaningfully confronted." Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016), which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019). He is a Cave Canem fellow, a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine.
Also a critic, Cameron earned his PhD from Stanford University's program in Modern Thought & Literature, and he is an assistant professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Currently, he is working on a book about maladjustment in trans literature and theory.