Mark Doty calls Obscenely Yours a thrilling book: crackingly alive, brilliant, and absolutely fearless.

"Poetry from Four Way Books, 2021 Spring"--

This volume approaches the issue of ambient sound through the ethnographic exploration of different cultural contexts including Italy, India, Egypt, France, Ethiopia, Scotland, Spain, Portugal, and Japan. It examines social, religious, and aesthetic conceptions of sound environments, what types of action or agency are attributed to them, and what bodies of knowledge exist concerning them. Contributors shed new light on these sensory environments by focusing not only on their form and internal dynamics, but also on their wider social and cultural environment. The multimedia documents of this volume may be consulted at the address: milson.fr/routledge_media.

"This book talks smack. This book chews with its open mouth full of the juiciest words, the most indigestible images. This book undoes me. . . . francine j. harris brilliantly ransacks the poet's toolkit, assembling art from buckets of disaster and shreds of hope. Nothing she lays her mind's eye on escapes. You, too, will be captured by her work."—Evie Shockley Lyrically raw and dangerously unapologetic, play dead challenges us to look at our cultivated selves as products of circumstance and attempts to piece together patterns amidst dissociative chaos. harris unearths a ruptured world dictated by violence—a place of deadly what ifs, where survival hangs by a thread. Getting by is carrying bruises and walking around with "half a skull." From "low visibility": I have light in my mouth. I hunger you. You want what comes in drag. a black squirrel in a black tar lane, fresh from exhaust, hot and July's unearthed steam. You want to watch it run over. to study the sog. You want the stink of gristle buried in a muggy weather. I want the faulty mirage. a life of grass. we want the same thing. We want their deaths to break up the sun. francine j. harris is a 2015 NEA Creative Writing Fellow whose first collection, allegiance, was a finalist for the 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery and PEN Open Book Award. Originally from Detroit, she is also Cave Canem fellow who has lived in several cities before returning to Michigan. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, and currently teaches writing at Interlochen Center for the Arts.

These thought-provoking and spiritual poems focus on faith, relationships, and the role of God in life and in the bedroom. Female empowerment is at the heart of this collection, as well as perceptions of humanity as beings full of light.

This debut highlights fatherhood at its peak as it juggles the uncertainty and deeper meaning of everyday life. The hesitant, yet curious voice of the poems are deeply entrenched in the familial, yet also refreshingly open about the crush one feels when their ideals crash down. How does one build a life, only to be redirected and start anew?

"With a music prowess both deft and ferocious, these empathetic poems in Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment woe and terrify simultaneously. Terrible things happen in this book and it's wonderful—such is the redemptive power of poetry this exquisite."—Dean Young This heart-wrenching book examines the tensions between the harshness of violence and the beauty of everyday life. There is a discourse with the wreckage in these poems that infiltrate life after trauma and violence as it perpetuates onward, pulling us into the speaker's domain and the endless cycle of attempting to overcome—without forgetting—the past. Alessandra Lynch is also the author of Sails the Wind Left Behind and It was a terrible cloud at twilight. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, The Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and other literary journals. Alessandra was born on the East River and now lives with her husband and sons by a stony creek, two hackberry trees, and a magnolia trio. She teaches in Butler University's undergraduate and MFA programs.

This collection highlights the complexities of fatherhood and how to raise young kids while bearing witness to the charged movements of social injustice and inequities of race in America. Memory, culpability, and our very humanness course through this book and strip us down to find joy and inspiration amid the darkness.

These political poems employ humor to challenge the cultural norms of American society, focusing primarily on racism, social injustices and inequality. Simultaneously, the poems take on a deeper, personal level as it carefully deconstructs identity and the human experience, piecing them together with unflinching logic and wit. Olzmann takes readers on a surreal exploration of discovery and self-evaluation.

In May’s debut collection, poems buzz and purr like a well-oiled chassis. Grit, trial, and song thrum through tight syntax and deft prosody. From the resilient pulse of an abandoned machine to the sinuous lament of origami animals, here is the ever-changing hum that vibrates through us all, connecting one mind to the next. “Linguistically acrobatic [and] beautifully crafted. . . [Jamaal May's] poems, exquisitely balanced by a sharp intelligence mixed with earnestness, makes his debut a marvel.” —Publishers Weekly “The elegant and laconic intelligence in these poems, their skepticism and bent humor and deliberately anti-Romantic stance toward experience are completely refreshing. After so much contemporary writing that seems all flash, no mind and no heart, these poems show how close observation of the world and a gift for plain-spoken, but eloquent speech, can give to poetry both dignity and largeness of purpose, and do it in an idiom that is pitch perfect to emotional nuance and fine intellectual distinctions. Hard-headed and tough-minded, Hum is the epitome of what Frost meant by ‘a fresh look and a fresh listen.’” —Tom Sleigh "Jamaal May’s debut collection, Hum, is concerned with what’s beneath the surfaces of things—the unseen that eats away at us or does the work of sustaining us. Reading these poems, I was reminded of Ellison’s ‘lower frequencies,’ a voice speaking for us all. May has a fine ear, acutely attuned to the sonic textures of everyday experience. And Hum—a meditation on the machinery of living, an extended ode to sound and silence—is a compelling debut.” —Natasha Trethewey "In his percussive debut collection Hum, Jamaal May offers a salve for our phobias and restores the sublime to the urban landscape. Whether you need a friend to confide in, a healer to go to, or a tour guide to take you there, look no further. That low hum you hear are these poems, emanating both wisdom and swagger.” —A. Van Jordan From "Mechanophobia: Fear of Machines": There is no work left for the husks. Automated welders like us, your line replacements, can't expect sympathy after our bright arms of cable rust over. So come collect us for scrap, grind us up in the mouth of one of us. Let your hand pry at the access panel with the edge of a knife, silencing the motor and thrum. Jamaal May is a poet, editor, and filmmaker from Detroit, MI where he taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer and touring performer. His poetry won the 2013 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and appears in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, The Believer, NER, and The Kenyon Review. Jamaal has earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College as well as fellowships from Cave Canem and The Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. He founded the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press.