Punks: New & Selected Poems

“Blacking it is mixing it up, funking it,” John Keene writes in the prose poem “Black(en).” As he puts it later on: “The manner always is unauthorized.”

In his protean new and selected collection, Punks, Keene sets aside any notion that a poet should be one consistent style or personality. He mixes it up with poems that move fluently among so many modes—personal, political, experimental, anecdotal, lyrical—that it’s clear he’s after something “unauthorized”: a re-centering of poetic universality and verisimilitude in the abundant reality, the “surplus of presence,” of a singular, gay, African American man who has lived through the AIDS pandemic and the murder of George Floyd.

Keene is superb at evoking both queer and African American experiences, from the joy of streets he has known:

THE PLACES THE FRENZY THE FACES THE MAZE OF THE 
CITY THE PRETTY RICANS WHO EMBRACED ME THE 
INNER SPACES I’M DRAWING THE FIREMEN KISSING
THE SKATEBOARDERS FLYING THE STREETWALKERS 

to the emotional toll of recent tragedies:

I step back: in order to feel it: the metallic memory: terror’s central image: lingers on the retina: the cops shot another

In “Try to Remember That South African Man,” he draws together gay and Black history via an intimate memory of the speaker mildly disagreeing with his lover, a survivor of apartheid, who responds:

Be quiet now, and then his palm covered my mouth and nose, leaving only a tiny slit for me to breathe. This is how they held me before they began to beat me, he said. Then he rained down another round of kisses.

In “searching always wherever imagination, this need, this mystery / of our presence […],” Keene creates a vital poetry that provides something compellingly idiosyncratic yet universal: “desire parsed, down to its constituent elements.”