Talking With Justin Phillip Reed About Indecency

Steven William Thrasher interviews Justin Phillip Reed, author of Indecency (Coffee House, 2018), for Lit Hub. After discussing the book's cover image, they move on to contextualizing some poems. An excerpt from this conversation:

SWT: I love this phrase, “history’s flattened,” that you had in the first poem (“Performing A Warped Masculinity En Route to the Metro”). How have you thought about, or experienced, history being flattened in this space and this time?

JPR: I think in that moment, I was thinking more of people as kind of visible containers or intersections of histories. But then, when you’re passing, you know, a random person on the street, you don’t really—or at least, I assume that most people don’t—consider that one single person is this really complex—to use Puar, assemblage.

SWT: Jasbir Puar (Terrorist Assemblages)?

JPR: Yeah. I was thinking that, I’m seeing these people on the street that I might see kind of all the time, or this might be the first time I encounter this person. But that I’m running into them in this space—and this is only a blip in the entire day that they’re living out. I was feeling very heavy in that moment. But in St. Louis, I find that it’s easy for any kind of history—especially concerning Black folks—to always be on the edge of being obliterated. With the way that this city’s planning kind of moves always in the direction of “progress” and trying to forget what had been thriving communities of color, there’s always this possibility to me that those legacies are overwritten. And I’m walking through that constantly.

SWT: How did you first find out about Michael Brown?

JPR: I think a friend texted me. And it was the day of [his shooting by Darren Wilson]. I don’t really remember exactly what the specifics of that exchange were, I just know that we felt immediately that we had to go out and march, and I had never been a person who goes out to a march or a protest, but I felt compelled to do so.

Read on here.