Dispatch
Poems
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Set against the media environment that saturates even our most intimate spaces, Dispatch attends to, revises, and thinks adjacent to the news of racial/gendered violence in the US, from the nineteenth century to the present day. These poems ask: What kind of revisions will make this a world/a story that is concerned with my people's flourishing? How ought I pay attention, how to register perpetual bad news without letting it fatally intrude? Cameron Awkward-Rich is among the most bracing voices to emerge in recent years, a dazzling exemplar of poetry's (and humanity's) possibilities.
About this Author
Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019). His creative work has been supported by fellowships from Cave Canem, The Watering Hole, and the Lannan Foundation. Also a scholar of trans theory and expressive culture in the U.S., Cameron earned his PhD from Stanford University's program in Modern Thought & Literature. His more critical writing can be found in Signs, Trans Studies Quarterly, American Quarterly and elsewhere, and has been supported by fellowships from Duke University's Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the ACLS. His book The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment was published by Duke University Press in Fall 2022. Presently, he is an associate professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Reviews
"... Awkward-Rich's terse yet beguiling lyric articulates what it is to inhabit a particular body at a particular time in history, and, in the shadow of violence, to seek--or resist--openness."
"Weighed down by the 'brutal choreography' of violence against black, queer, and trans bodies, the poet reestablishes buoyancy through will and formidable artistry... in these poems of bracing clarity, national violence is unflinchingly and meaningfully confronted. "
"Awkward-Rich seeks his own differentiation, recognition, the perhaps impossible goal of feeling truly seen for your whole self. "
"The poems in Awkward-Rich's second collection 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. "
"Awkward-Rich also grounds and interrogates corporal experience through a variety of poetic forms... [he] imagines building a world inside your body full of the people you love that have been taken from you, the beauty that you can find there."
"Such profoundly personal narration in debuts has been done--and will be done again--but Awkward-Rich's rawness and dexterity in conveying complex issues push his verse beyond stereotypes."
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