Refuse
Poems
Published on 11. August 2018
103 pages
978-0-8229-8617-1 (ISBN)
Description
Set against the backdrop of the Obama presidency, Julian Randall's Refuse documents a young biracial man's journey through the mythos of Blackness, Latinidad, family, sexuality and a hostile American landscape. Mapping the relationship between father and son caught in a lineage of grief and inherited Black trauma, Randall conjures reflections from mythical figures such as Icarus, Narcissus and the absent Frank Ocean. Not merely a story of the wound but the salve, Refuse is a poetry debut that accepts that every song must end before walking confidently into the next music.
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Person
Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago. He has received fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT, and The Watering Hole and was the 2015 National College Slam (CUPSI) Best Poet. Julian is the curator of Winter Tangerine Review's Lineage of Mirrors. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as New York Times Magazine, The Georgia Review, and Sixth Finch and in the anthologies Portrait in Blues, Nepantla, and New Poetry from the Midwest. He is a candidate for his MFA in Poetry at Ole Miss.
Content
- Intro
- Contents
- Icarus
- A Thousand Cardinals
- Biracial Ghazal: Why Everything Ends in Blood
- This Land Is Where We Buried Everything That Came Before You: African American History and Concepts of Ownership in Early Elementary Education
- Friday Night Lights #1
- In A Rare Moment of Nostalgia My Father Reflects on Obama's First Inauguration
- Taxonomy Regarding My Mother
- I Think Everybody Has a Year They Never Really Leave
- Summer After
- Elegy for the Winter after Taina Was Cancelled
- Chicago*
- Wasn't the Minotaur Buried Horns First: Vulnerability and Identity in the Mythic Body
- A Poem about Trees That Is Not Actually a Poem about Trees
- Nearly 7 Years after the Fact a Boy Whose Nose I Nearly Broke Hits Me Up for Brunch
- In the Netflix Trailer Obama Says "I Don't" Fit in Anywhere" While Anthony Hamilton Pulls a Burning City Out of His Mouth
- Obama Says "Mutts Like Me" in the Mirror Every Morning While I Get Ready for School
- The Academy of Acceptable Loss
- Pregame Prayer with Complete Citations
- Coverage
- You Got McDonald's Money?
- Friday Night Lights #20
- Friday Night Lights #51
- The Spook Who Sat by the Once Bombed City: Psychological Explorations of Ancestral Memory Through the Lens of Racial Battle Trauma
- The Space Between Skins Is Called a Wound
- Translation
- On The Night I Consider Coming Out to My Parents
- (Self) Inflicted
- Frank Ocean Sighting #268: Frank Ocean Is Rumored to Speak of Rivers Which Is Likely a Lie (Disc 1)
- Narcissus
- The Author Is Often Mistaken for Obama's Long Lost Son
- Insomniac Soliloquy
- My Father Watches Ferguson Vol. 1
- Portrait of My Father as Sisyphus
- My Father Watches Ferguson Vol. 2
- Palinopsia
- Police Dream #607
- Palinopsia
- Elegy for the Summer after Django Unchained Came Out on DVD
- Palinopsia
- Regrets
- Ghazal for the Suicidal Thought
- Palinopsia
- The Search for Frank Ocean or a Brief History of Disappearing
- Variation on a Theme of Genetics
- Leslie Odom Jr. Sings Obama's Anger on NPR
- Mercy, Mercy, Him
- Tanka for the 4th of July
- Zealots of Stockholm or Elegy for the Still Alive
- Obama Wants to Be Clear about His Legacy
- Obama Speaks of Rivers but We Have Always Been on Different Shores
- Negrotopia #3
- Sad Nigga Manifesto
- Acknowledgments
