The Malevolent Volume

Subverting celebrated classics of poetry and mythology alongside horrors from contemporary film and cultural fact, Justin Phillip Reed engages blackness as an aesthetic in order to conjure the revenant animus lurking beneath the exploited civilities of the marginalized. In these revisionary poems, Reed attempts to find powerful agency in the other-than-human identities assigned to those most assaulted by savageries of the state. In doing so he simultaneously conjures a retaliatory, counterviolent body, one that resurrects a collective black spirit to walk the earth anew.