Punks: New & Selected Poems

by John Keene

A landmark collection of poetry by acclaimed fiction writer, translator, and MacArthur Fellow John Keene, Punks: New & Selected Poems is a generous treasury in seven sections that spans decades and includes previously unpublished and brand new work. With depth and breadth, Punks weaves together historic narratives of loss, lust, and love. The many voices that emerge in these poems—from historic Black personalities, both familial and famous, to the poet's friends and lovers in gay bars and bedrooms—form a cast of characters capable of addressing desire, oppression, AIDS, and grief through sorrowful songs that "we sing as hard as we live." At home in countless poetic forms, Punks reconfirms John Keene as one of the most important voices in contemporary poetry.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Queer, Gay, Nonfiction, Queer Lit, Race

Audio CD

First published December 1, 2021

About the author

John Keene is the author of the novel Annotations (New Directions); the poetry collection Seismosis (1913 Press), an art-text collaboration with artist Christopher Stackhouse; the short fiction collection Counternarratives, published in 2015 by New Directions; and the poetry collection Punks: New & Selected Poems, published in 2021 by The Song Cave. His translation of Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer (Nightboat Books) appeared in 2014. His stories, poems, essays, and translations have appeared in a wide array of periodicals and anthologies, including most recently Vice, TriQuarterly, The Offing, and Boundary. An artist as well, he has exhibited his work in New York and Berlin, and teaches at Rutgers University-Newark.

Reviews

[nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

READING VLOG

“𝘓𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘧𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘴, 𝘺𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘥𝘢𝘺’𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘸’𝘴
𝘓𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘺𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘥𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘸𝘴,
𝘓𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘣𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘦𝘯𝘥,
𝘓𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘦𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘣𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘰𝘳 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘣𝘦, 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘦,
𝘓𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧, 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘵𝘰𝘰 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩
𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘦,
𝘓𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦.
𝘓𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘣𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦.”

A reminder that the body is a pleasure but also a a becoming-burden of so much sadness. And when the body is queer and black, all of the pleasure and burden is intense, fierce, hurts especially when all those around you drop dead like flies. Nina Simone makes sense. Sade makes sense. All the music from blackness makes sense and this is an incredible collection of reminders that life is beautiful.

Beauty finds you.
You also have to find beauty.
Beauty is sadness. Beauty is pleasure.
Beauty is a grappling, best presented here, as lyrical as a sailor’s song, as a sailor’s yearning for the company of flesh, the taste of salt. So,

set sail.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strong queer poetry dominates the early parts of this book. I liked the street language used and the imagery it created. This gave way to mid-book semi-short stories of poetry that did not have the same power. The later book got esoteric enough that not even rereading the lines yielded any more understanding for me.

Early book: 5
Mid book: 3.5
Late book: 3

A favorite on page 12...

Napolean Club
Navy sky, white moon, red brick,
door and bell: discretion was the precondition
for elegance. Inside, gray hair peers

from every other head and open-collared chest.
There's currency here in being the youngest.
I pass my dollars across the bar-no beer

for me though it's butcher. A gin and tonic.
I sip and see how far my smile and wit and calves
sculpted in high school sprints can get me.

Nearby, men hover around a sleek black
grand piano, singing "My Funny Valentine"
in unison because it's February, "Somewhere

Over the Rainbow" because it's Judy.
On the dance floor beats tap gently
between the spinning bodies. I ignore

As first two guys who ignore me, approach
a third brother, debonaire in his military-cut suit
and patent leather loafers, stout as a general,

ageless as a vampire. To Duran Duran,
Gloria Gaynor we twirl out a sweat, mouthing
the lyrics to songs we recall without effort

into each other's grins, glide closer, kiss,
return to bopping. We agree that rhythm's
a bridge to the soul and we'll cross it, grab

our overcoats, trot out into the Boston dark, fingers
popping to steps as hot as the groove in our hips, melting
night snow on the tips of our tongues: "Ain't no stopping us now ..."

[Griffin Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps the only National Book Award winning volume of poetry that has a poem about anal fisting—& that poem alone is worth the award.

[Darryl Suite · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[Gregory Duke · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

A lot of earnest joy (and a fair amount of anger) in this collection. A lot of it did not strike me, but I always found Keene's formal range intriguing, and some did land. Those describing gay life during the AIDS crisis and today felt so ebullient and concerned with love. So much love for black bodies. And some of them made me laugh a bit internally (I wish more of them did). "Punks" and "You Have Smallish Hands for a Brother" are probably my favorites.

[Crystal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of my favorite poetry audiobooks of 2023.

[Joseph Dante · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughtful, erudite, and eclectic - formally and sonically varied, with the different sections of the book acting more like mini-collections of poetry. Poetry of place, poems that act as time capsules, persona poems of black figures from history, family poems, letter poems, music poems, language poems. I learned new words. My favorite sections were from the beginning and the end: "Playland," "The Lost World," "Dark to Themselves," and "Words."

[Dree · Rating 4 out of 5]

2022 NBA for Poetry Winner

This collection is not themed, but it does show the range of Keene's work. The sections of the book are themed--in content or form. And his form varies widely within the book. Some poems are paragraphs, others look like stereotypical poems on the page, others play with form and text and white space.

Topics vary widely--lgtb relationships and issues, baseball, music, places, poetry. My favorite thing about this collection is its accessibility. Most of these poems are not conversation with other poets. These poems can largely be understood by the average non-academic poetry reader (me).

Manzanita was my favorite section, probably because of the historical references and settings. I also really liked the poem Words in the section also titled Words.

[Samuel Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is hard to rate since it is sort of a collection of collections that are very different from each other. Some I would give 5 stars, some less. But generally this was good. I thought that the best collections were Manzanita and Dark to Themselves.

[Teddy Silva · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Freedom is sailing
by the compass of possibility, fearless,
even if with no ship or sea at all.
You will stay and write until
your heart runs out. You will take this
dark knowledge and spread it.”

[t]

poems so gorgeous i literally cried.

[Seth Shimelfarb-Wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

So strong

[Eva Gustafsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

4+. Läst den svenska översättningen.

[Theodore · Rating 5 out of 5]

just knocked it out the park. Keene does it every time.

[Haruka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for a book club - popular opinion was the the beginning and end are more exciting, but I really liked the middle esp. the recuerdas poems

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If sorrow is a suit, it's weight is incalculable."

Recommended poems:
-Suit
-These Days, These Days
-Words

[juch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read for class. Prob 3/5. It’s wide ranging in form but generally lyric, kinda uneven, 200+ pp. I actually did like the cruising poems, the realist lyricism that my “MFA” that’s into “language poetry” has successfully biased me against. However I am bumping the rating down bc I was soooo annoyed by my in class discussion of it. Being wide ranging and uneven does not mean this book is “punk,” it means that the publishers gave the author leeway bc he has a MacArthur genius grant. Rating a national book award winner 2 stars on Goodreads? That’s punk

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

'At the anti-war demonstration—
a civil circus: no one
hears the screaming
in our nightmares.

A moment's quiet, all soulbeats
fluting in unison.

Each speaker wanders off
into mistranslation.

Finally a common voice
mounting the stage: justice.
Then a plan for action animates our voices,
drawn from the future.

('Postcard: The March', p79)

[Elsie Coen · Rating 3 out of 5]

didn’t do it for me all the way through, feeling more like a too-heavy anthology than a themed collection. ultimately the subject overpowered the craft in most of the latter poems. often the words felt too literal for the form they fit into. some gems, and some appearances i of keene’s talented voice, but would’ve preferred a much smaller and more carefully pruned collection

[Christopher Louderback · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sharply beautiful amalgam of form; poetry that pushes outside the lines and somehow shapes a whole—full of a kind of spectral voyeurism, a language that investigates queerness, race, history, self, sex, intimacy, brotherhood, loss, and joy.

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

"NEW AND SELECTED" ordinarily signals that the poet has already published four or five collections and is a well-established, mid-career poet who has attracted enough interest to warrant a publisher's venturing on an "introduction to" volume. So far as I can tell, however, this is Keene's first collection. He has published a book of (brilliant) short fiction, Counternarratives, and a book of (likewise brilliant) essays (or perhaps "experimental novel"), Annotations, and a chapbook or two, but no collections from which poems could be selected in the ordinary way.

Perhaps, though, the subtitle is a way to indicate that this a debut collection that is not exactly a debut, i.e., not a book by someone newly and dewily emerged from an MFA program. Keene is no fledgling. Punks is more like Wallace Stevens's Harmonium or Robert Duncan's Opening of the Field; it's the first collection of someone who has been publishing for quite a while and whose first collection readers have for years and years been jonesing for. In effect, he indeed is a well-established, mid-career poet.

And a strong one, so no wonder that the book won the National Book Award in 2022 (and a Lambda Literary Award and a Thom Gunn Award).

The book has wide stylistic variety--not the variety of "I'm going to try to write a sestina now," but the variety of an evolving, exploratory, deeply-considered relationship to form. We get not only some high-polish New Yorker-ish things, some dramatic monologues somewhat reminiscent of that modern master of the form, Richard Howard, but also some poems that seem to have the spoken-word urgency slam and some experimental page-as-field poems.

We can also tell that the the poems were not all written recently. The book's opening sections, "Playland" and "The Lost World" evoke the LGBTQ social and cultural milieu of the 1980s and 1990s as it was lived in different American cities, the feeling of emerging affirmation and pride strong and salient even while the shadow of AIDS flickers. The same sense of a long-maturing, generations-deep awareness informs the poems that deal with Black history (unsurprising coming from the author off Counternarratives).

I couldn't say whether Punks is going to have the long tail of Harmonium or Opening of the Field, but I think it very well could. It's really good.

[Lo · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s frustrating if anything. Keene writes beautifully personal poetry about his experiences and his life. Likening the world to people and vice versa. Seeing the beauty in the mundane, but far too often in this collection he is inventing a facsimile of a lived life and forcing the beauty into the already magnificent.

I think one of my main frustrations with this book is Keene’s constant dedications, elegies, etc. to famous figures like Vesey and Alain Locke. They are not in the vain of Langston Hughes’ “Ballad of Lenin,” rather these are mythographic and historical fiction. He lyricizes as though he can peer into their worlds. As though he carries the significant strata of them. It’s holding the great man theory in an even more perverse and voyeuristic lens. The first book was the best part when it was personal and full of love and anger. He so easily can write upon these emotions and I wish he did so more.

“Elegy: Boston” was not only a lament for the city. But the city was represented by his lover. A lover that grounded the days through touch. Another one, “Grind,” is fun because it can be read over and over again like they are profiles on a grid catching your eye or convos passing in the wind. It’s not groundbreaking but it’s fun.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first two sections of "Punks" -- entitled "Playland" and "The Lost World" -- are jaw-droppingly good, with more than a few near-perfect poems possessing a strong sense of person and place and feeling. But the fourth section, "Trees" (a series of poems cowritten by Cynthia Gray) lacks that brilliant specificity. It's as if we've gone from neon to pastel with the turn of a page. At that point, I put the book down, and while I eventually picked it back up (How could I not when there's verses like "Mission and Outpost" and "The Angel of Desolation"?), "Punks" had lost its momentum for me. There are wonderful poems ahead, doubt not: the Miles Davis tribute "Apostate"; the structurally inventive "Dear Trane (Lecture on Something)" but until the final chapter, the wondrous "Words," I had a hard time finding a continuous groove. Since this collection's subtitle is "New & Selected Poems," the truth may be as simple as this. John Keene had periods during which he wrote poems that make me swoon and periods where what he wrote didn't have the same kind of magic. But how many poets make magic ever? I tip my hat to the man (as I draw out a rabbit).

[Octavia Rose]

I really loved some of the poems in here, particularly the section "The Lost World", a series of vignettes about various hookups experiences of intimacy. I loved how these scenes assembled together into such a rich tapestry. A few other favorites are "Then Things I do Every Day", "Punks" and "The Soul is Always Beautiful."

Keene has such an incredible mastery of rhythm, language and form. I wonder if I would have enjoyed reading one or two of these sections as individual books instead of a collected volume -- the subjects, themes and structures varied so much that at times it felt overwhelming trying to process it all in one single book. Still, absolutely worth the read! Highly recommend

[Lucas Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of dense and diverse poetry is a true example of care, passion, and craft. It is deserving of all of the accolades and I'm very pleased that it will introduce more people to the author. Personally, though, I just didn't connect with a lot of it. I think a lot of the style is just not what I am most drawn to in my very amateur and timid appreciation of poetry. It is clearly accomplished and I celebrate it for that. I was so blown away by the author's fiction that I am happy to wait for him to publish more.

[Geoff Coffey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I heard John Keane interviewed about this book of poetry and ordered it right away. In the interview he read his remarkable poem Beatitudes which begins benignly: “Love Everything.” And then proceeds to take this line seriously. It is a bold poem, and you will nod, scowl, and wonder.

Love the monster breeding inside you and slaughter him with love.
Love the shipwreck of your body, your mind’s salted garden.<\blockquote>

Punks is large, powerful, and ambitious collection—the kind of book you can open to a random page, read, and be effected.

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75⭐️ rounded up

I really did enjoy this book. I tried to read it straight through as if it was a novel, but I think (since it was longer than other poetry books I’ve read recently) it would have been better to pace my reading more and allow more time with the poems. I have a long list of favorites. “To Trane” was hard for me to figure out how to read, I won’t lie. But I was fascinated by it nonetheless (also love John Cage). The Recuerdas poems were harder for me, but I want to get them so bad 😭 “Post-Black” is on my favorites list.

[wade · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful collection that never bores and always excites the reader with its wide variety of subject material and style of presentation. Some are biographical, some observational and some experimental. All are blessed with Keene's unique perspective as a gay black artist in modern America. I can certainly see why the collection received all its well deserved plaudits and praise. A great poet at the top of his game.

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Keene mixes the anger and joy of the black and queer community during the AIDS crisis, pulling from both his life and key figures in black history. Keene employs realist lyrics, prose poems, experimental verse, and many other kinds of poems--his range is really on display here. Dense, passionate, and varied, and overpacked with poems, this is a great way to encounter John Keene's poetic work.

[Kelli Reinhardt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this collection of poems was a journey, one wide-ranging in subject, style, and voice. I typically enjoy poetry but I felt this volume asks a lot of its readers (arguably, as poetry should!) There were many times I “didn’t get it,” and I chalk that up to, “maybe it’s not for me to get.” There are several standout poems in the anthology, including one about Miles Davis that I swear can be read along with his music, the lyricism is so similar.