“I learned to cry like that, as if
I could sprain the heart, the body hurting its way out.

But that morning my mind snuck
back to the nights he took paychecks and split,

sometimes for weeks, his head and body
humming for dope, his wife and kids

suspended by the boundlessness of waiting.”
-from What I Mean When I Say Elijah-Man

I love the softness of the word ‘masculine’. Too often the word is associated with what is muscular, rigid, strong, recluse, stubborn, & fisted. Geffrey Davis’ work takes that off and splits it open, shows us the soft cotton that makes the word muscular, the tender, purple flesh it takes to make the word strong possible. Geffrey’s work tackles manhood, fatherhood, sonhood (I’m gonna claim that as a thing today), love, & sexuality with a boxer’s hands: firm & weathered, capable of so much violence and wreckage, but purposefully gentle & fond when handling our fragile humanity. Geffrey is a master of the turn, able to guide us patiently through the nature of work, and because he is such a honest voice we trust him to lead us to where we want to go, where he wants us to go. He holds back from giving you the entirety of what he wants to say, and rations you the goods until you reach the end having survived and full from the nourishment of his words. People have taken notice of this. You name it, Geffrey has won it. This year he has been awarded two different prizes from literary journals, won BOA Edition’s A. Poulin, Jr. Prize, selected by the brilliant Dorianne Laux, and soon you will be able to carry the raw workings of Geffrey around in your pocket. Folks, get into Geffrey Davis. This man is a wonder of strength & delicacy, someone that we will watch for years and he muscles his way to the venerable & quiet. 

-Danez Smith

“When she plants her fist
in the sloppy pocket of my chest,
I topple. When we lose people
say things like, ‘That’s pathetic,’
without say what, precisely.”
-from Women’s Rugby

When I first encountered Aimee Le’s work, I was floored. That pattern has continued ever since. Her work comes to you dressed as a human, all humble and vulnerable and whatnot, until you realize it’s a steed ready to gallop all over your emotions & ideas of language. What strikes me the most is Aimee’s frankness with words, everything is said plain as day, albeit beautiful and adorned, there is nothing hidden or disguised. We are at first taken in by the clarity of Aimee’s voice, swooned by it, and then Aimee starts giving it to us. Do you hear me honey? I have read and watched in amazement at the things I was hearing on stage, how bare the words came, how honestly Aimee offered them to the audience, moving all the BS out the way so we could actually talk about and consider the real world concerns of the poem. This work calls us to consider, calls us to action, calls up a visceral reaction from baring witness to such amazing truth. Aimee masterfully handles race, sexuality, desire, gender, and survival in a way that is laden with care, but allows those topics of have their teeth and nails. Aimee grants her poetry the permission to be soft, but also the permission to hurt, to fight, to show its music and bones and use them to defend, defend, defend. Folks, you needs to get into Aimee Le, child’s work will make you believe in something greater and in the greatness of yourself and the blood filled folks around you. Get into it and let Aimee’s work get into you. 


-Danez Smith

“Nobody notices the way the word
races off, searching for a neck
to wrap around.

This endless running with scissors.
This is something’s daughter.”
-from Bitch

Miles Walser can do things to my emotions that shouldn’t be possible. His work and the glory that it be can take me from joy to sorrow and back without warning & against what I want, but definitely what I and the poem need. It’s more than a rollercoaster of emotions, it’s turbulence at its most graceful, it is wind after wind after wind blowing us over and around until we find ourselves standing, unsure of which way we came from but certain of where we must go. I trust Miles to guide me through his work, to bring me to a place where peace is a possibility, even if I am still wandering through the shadows. Miles’s work handles race masterfully, always aware & questioning and pushing forward a conversation on privilege that doesn’t have to be moderated by brown bodies. Miles’s work is also aware of the body, able to honor it and adorn it with golden language, but also able to question its role in our lives and our daily performances. To that same masterful extent, Miles navigates love and love lost, able to make us swoon & need the act of needing, but also able to make us retreat, not from work, but from the gruesome & teeth laden possibility of love. I am so grateful for the love in Miles’s work (the love of self, community, family, and lover) and for his ability to critique it, question it, doubt it, revive it, and give it back to us in the form of amazing verse that is just as brilliantly performed as it is written. Miles demands our attention, much like darkness does in his new book What The Night Demands. Folks, I am HERE for Miles Walser and you should be too, if for no other reason his work is here for you.

-Danez Smith

“My mother was built from faux wood paneling 
and my father just loved to rattle her walls, such a 
small room he kept her in, loved to force his big 
shoulders through all her doorways”

-from Hera VI

Sometimes words are just plain sexy. Not necessarily saying sexy things, but they look so fine with their curves and lines, all stiff and voluptuous, looking like a secret & sweat soaked dance party on the page. Lauren Banka’s work does that for me. Her work as a text artist so empowers her poetry to be nothing short of visually stunning and clap worthy (not applause, but clap. Her work makes me wanna bounce all kinds of ways). Lauren feels like a poet of many hands, able to hold in her hands race, gender, sexuality, survival, addiction, & so many other things with equal weight in her hands, able to offer each one and then pull it back in a flash. Lauren’s work toys with us. We are sometimes too caught in the beauty of the words to notice the beast that lurks in the lines, often too amused by Lauren’s wit and humor to realize that nothing in the landscape she maps should be laughed at until it’s too late. Lauren hides brilliance within brilliance, able to layer her work like a good onion, and we peel and peel until we find ourselves in tears, sometimes from the hurt, some from the overwhelming amounts of joy for love and life. In that same layered vein, Lauren is able to lift her poetry off the page and into the air in the same way. Her stage presence is riveting to watch, able to the rise and cool your blood at will, giving her poems the exact voice in performance that they are asking for in text. And she fly. What more could you want? People of the world, I need you to get into Lauren Banka. Her work is delicious, nutritious, and part of a balanced life. Amen.

-Danez Smith

“...I could have killed
my white friend for walking in on us.
Or kissed him, right there in the dorms.
Damn the smoldering Newporty cherry
that bathed my room in red. And you
cocking-back that cold, hard Glock
against Samuel L. Jackson’s dick.”

-from Love Letter to Pam Grier

Thank God for making whatever planet Marcus Wicker comes from, but damn him for not giving us access to that land. I want to go to wherever he is from and dance in their sun. Well, this weekend I did. I was in Ann Arbor and at only a glimpse, I stepped into the world of much of Marcus’ writing. What an interesting, cul-de-sacy place to write about blackness in & that’s why I am HERE for Marcus, he is expanding the diaspora so much by what it means to be black in several different spaces than the narrative we are most commonly offered. Marcus is a wizard of race, sexuality, class, and pop culture. He writes within the intersection of all his identities, not attempting to dodge the coming traffic, but allowing it all to move through him and become active participants, even when on an undercurrent, in the work. With all those spirits and partners active in the work, Marcus’ work really comes alive off the page. I am convinced that Marcus’s poems get haircuts on weekends, have occasional hangovers, and forget to call Marcus like they should, that they are veined and bruised and smiling somewhere, that’s how alive his work is. Don’t trust me? Go read ‘Maybe The Saddest Thing’, Marcus’s National Poetry Series winning collection. First off, the cover feels amazing and makes you aware of yourself the entire time you are reading his brilliance. 2nd, the book holds you, pinches you, kisses you soft, rubs up against your jeans, does all likes of things to show you how much it cares for you, same way Marcus cares for the work. Folks, get into Marcus Wicker, if you really love his work, get into the Southern Indiana MFA where he teaches (killing the game) and let his poems overcome you with their humanity.

-Danez Smith 

“If we ever get to where 
            we want to go,

I swear I will erupt,
            as a wingless bird

carried up by my own
            bloodless imagination,

untethered
            as the hand of a god.”

-from The Strap-on Speaks

Poetry is a seductive little fella. When it comes to discovering new work, we have the privilege & opportunity of putting so much of our personalities and blood into our poems that we become them, and when done write, our poems wink and grow come-hither fingers asking the reader, ‘don’t ya wanna read more?’ Kendra DeColo’s work drew me in. I found a set of poems from her & I was hooked. I binged on poem after poem the same way her poems binge on desire. Kendra’s work is so filled with a bone-quivering want that I cannot help to want myself; when she needs, I need, and what can you do but shudder when standing before her brilliant articulation of yearning? Shudder, that’s what. Maybe drool, as I often find my mouth agape after reading Kendra’s brilliance. These are poems that are fully aware and embracive of pleasure and pain, poems that are aware of their senses. Her work is willing to touch, leaving no body part unaware of its song, These poems are bursting out of their seams with sound and music, and at the same time they are drenched in every color from the 125 piece crayon set owned by the coolest kid in your 3rd grade class. Kendra’s work is indeed cool, which might be a dangerous word. While her work is all at once urgent, needed, gentle, and pushing us forward, I still find myself saying ‘that was f**king awesome’ after I finish that last exhausting line. Her work is cognizant of our generation and how we were shaped and broken down, hence she speaks in a language that is relatable as it is beautiful, colloquial & inventive in the same breathe. People, let Kendra DeColo into your world! She will be here for a minute, and when she becomes one of your new favorites and eventually takes over the world with her poetry, I won’t even say ‘I told you so.’ 

“Like you, I was born underwater.
(I lied: there was never a stone.)
Like you, I was born but that’s not the half of it:

I lived. Lord, I lived.”

-from Epitaph at the Foot of the Stone

Let’s talk about Rickey Laurentiis aka Rickey ‘Ballin On These Stanzas’ Laurentiis aka Rickey ‘Show You How Much My Words Worth’ Laurentiis aka Rickey ‘Sashay, I’m Paid’ Laurentiis for a second. If you didn’t catch on, Rickey gets the money. In 2012, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly Fellowship & a NEA grant, and here is why. Rickey’s work comes you humbly but with fist. There are emotions and dramatic turns hidden in plain view, but their surprise is just as grand as if they came from out of nowhere. In Rickey, we see the hands of Lucille Clifton, Robert Hayden, and Toi Derricote working their way through his work, guiding this young voice and catapulting to a level of mastery on the page that makes me quiver at the idea that homie is under 25. Rickey’s words soften you, breaks you to dust, then give you your humanity back to you one bit at a time. Rickey’s work is a celebration of survival, of lust, of the holy and the not whole; it’s a testimony as much as it is a test. Rickey can call all the gods down from the hills in the same breathe that he can question the light within himself and in all of us. This man is a lightning to be reckoned with. I sit in awe of the genuine power and grace that shapes his work into the pillar of joy that it is in my life, his ability to demand the human in all of us to stand in attention and be accountable. I am HERE for Rickey Laurentiis. He is a poet we will be seeing for years to come, someone we will continue to learn from. Rickey, Shante, you stay. Reader, Sashay away to the Internet and get into Mr. Laurentiis. 

-Danez Smith

“I make her a charade of holy
a stampede of raw
too much
too much

She can barely look at anything
without crying.

She everything’s wife.”

-from Angel’s Heart Clowns the Ocean

What in God’s black earth am I to say of Angel Nafis? Understand that in lieu of writing about her, I was tempted to post of black kids singing Nina Simone’s "I got life" next to a fire in an undisclosed backyard BBQ, but I couldn’t find no ribs. Understand that Angel is everything right with poetry. She is so unapologetically herself in her writing, which allows her to take up so much space with her pieces of holy, holy that we will go ahead and call poems. Angel often writes about the idea of everything, of all, of the world, but in such a masterful way that we can’t question the everything and everywhere of her world, of her black girl brilliance in is vastness and depth. I am HERE for Angel Nafis. Never have I encountered someone so in touch with language that she can hold it up against her skin and sweat with it just as quick as she can give it the finger start and slamming doors all up in her poems. Her book, Black Girl Mansion (in which I would expect to find aunties like Harriet Mullen, Tracy K. Smith, and Patricia Smith), is a heaven I want to live in. Her poems on family & lost, of need to love and need to be loved, on the black of her skin and the black of this world all sing their songs so loud, tipsy, and brilliant. They make you want to read the whole thing out loud, to give the world back the beauty, which it has given us through Angel. That beauty is Angel’s proof of pain, of love, of fun, of lust, of all the things a human can and should experience, is so brilliantly fit into her poems and we are lucky enough to be sharing this earth right now to get to experience that. So, if you don’t already know the deal, get into Angel Nafis, and let her boogie and holy funk get all the way up into you, move you, and bring you into the sky. 

-Danez Smith

“And I hate it, you know. My body.
Or my father. Often, I cannot understand
that difference. “
-from The City

Poetry is my favorite kind of schoolhouse. Nothing gets me going like opening myself up to a poet’s words and feeling them step inside of me with a lesson planned, letting there knowledge overtake my body. Cam Awkward-Rich is a curriculum my body is often not ready for. I didn’t study for his work. I showed up unprepared and was swept away slowly by the glory. Cam’s work is patient, it sits staring you in the eye and only moves when it wants to, but when it moves? Get out of the way (don’t really, just stand there and let the words become you). Cam’s work takes its time. There are no unnecessary bells and whistles, no gaudy dressing up, the writing comes to you bare, with every image earned, every line sharp with it’s curtness and stunning, razor edged truth about race, family, identity, gender, and any number of topics that Cam is able to weave with his master’s touch. Cam makes you wait while the sea change happens around you, begs you to drown in the work, but not try to fight. I’ve never been so wonderfully breathless. And that’s just on the page. When placed in front of a mic, Cam is just as alive and patient as the poems he cast into the world. There is no thing out of place (there is a theme here) and because of that, Cam gives one of the most genuine, honest readings I’ve ever seen. It is refreshing as it is stunning, gentle as it is clawed. Thank you to all the Gods for Cam Awkward-Rich, to Time for knowing how to slow the world around you when you are encountering his work. Y’all, if you don’t know, get into Cam. You won’t be mad, but you’ll be floored by the steady awe of his work for sure. 
-Danez Smith

Editor's Note: All caught up. <3 :)
-Nate Marshall,
Asst. Poetry Editor, Muzzle

“I am tired of talking about names and the power
of names, but it’s the only thing I’ve ever talked about,
so here we go again, lips to the topography, eyes
to the signs, teeth in the guidebook, designing a language
to write letters home in”

from Siete Dolores de Nuestra Señora

Have you ever watched a child play? If you haven’t, put on your least creepy clothes and go take a walk around your local park. Good, now that you’ve done that, did you see the look in their eyes when they have discovered something new? How the world becomes white space around them and the only things that exist are them, the object of their fascination, and their hunger to know every detail of it’s possibility? That is the work of Fiona Chamness. Where some poets have decided far before hand that they know the outcome and journey of the poem before they have set down to write it, Fiona’s work takes us on the journey of not knowing, of figuring it out, of getting wrist and elbow, sometimes whole body deep into the dirt of a poem, sifting through and finding the root of what she is seeking to understand. It is that childlike hunger to know coupled with her several lifetimes of wisdom that keeps me starving for Fiona’s work. I need to bare witness to the way she figures it out, and when she does… LAWD! She work does more than come off the page, it sprints off, knocks over your coffee mug, does the Chicken Head next to your grandmother, and then sits down and talks about the finer points of queer body politics with you. That is a poem I want around all the time. That is a poet I can stand behind. Away from the page, Fiona is a brilliant performer, able to give her poems the life and voice required for such strong, mesmerizing work. And she can sang, child! You think you know whats good in the world? Then you must know Fiona Chamness, and if you don’t, please introduce yourself to her work and let it take you wherever it wants to go.  
-Danez Smith