Indecency

by Justin Phillip Reed

Intricate, Intimate, Difficult, and Confrontational Poems That Push at the Boundaries of Selfhood, Skin, Culture, Sexuality, and Blood.

Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful―the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Queer, Gay, African American, Adult, Race

70 pages, Paperback

First published May 8, 2018

About the author

Justin Phillip Reed is an American poet living in St. Louis. His work appears in African American Review, Best American Essays, Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, Obsidian, and elsewhere. He holds a BA in creative writing from Tusculum College and an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. The author of the chapbook A History of Flamboyance (YesYes Books 2016), he has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Conversation Literary Festival. Reed currently organizes the St. Louis community-based poetry workshop series Most Folks At Work. He was born and raised in South Carolina.

Reviews

[Roxane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this book but whew. I am honestly not smart enough to make sense of many of these poems. I read and re-read many of these poems and just didn't know what I was reading. The ones I did understand were incredible, but there was just a lot of inscrutable poetry here. Clearly, this is all brilliant work. I just..prefer a bit more accessibility and that fault is mine, not the poet's. Paroxysm is staggeringly good. Across all the poems, Reed has a lot of prescient things to say about blackness, violence, sexuality, stigma. He challenges notions of what is truly indecent. There is a lot of experimentation with form. Some of it works and some of it... does not. This is absolutely a collection worth reading. My response is purely borne of my own preferences, not the work in question.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wanted to love this one but couldn’t understand a good amount of it. Justin Phillip Reed tackles pressing topics – masculinity, sexuality, white supremacy, etc. – with raw emotion and leaves few clean conclusions. His words pack a lot of power and show his pain and the depth of his feeling. The queerness and blackness of this collection, and the way Reed navigates these social identities with so much heart and vulnerability, makes Indecency a necessary addition to the existing canon of poetry. Unfortunately, as someone not that well-versed in poetry I found myself confused by several of these poems, such that I could grasp a few lines, an emotion, or an overall subject but couldn’t comprehend the poem as a whole. Unsure if this stems from my lack of poetry reading comprehension or the obscurity of Reed’s language. Still, would recommend this to people who like poetry and who find themselves drawn to work that questions the white, heteronormative social order through a personal perspective.

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've told this story. I barely graduated.
I stunted my own growth. I don't know how
to go home. What you don't know is
I needed someone like you but braver. Now
I just have issues with needing anyone at all.

Somehow both sophisticated and brutal, Indecency, the 2018 National Book Award winner for poetry, is full of vivid imagery and beautiful language that I was constantly marveling at, but honestly a lot of what Reed was doing was over my head. This book absolutely deserves five stars, and it also deserves the kind of attention I don't feel I can give it right now. And so, Indecency will join Louise Glück's Faithful and Virtuous Night in my list of collections I need to reread someday.

[Jerrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the NBA longlist for poetry - this is a stunning collection dealing with issues of race and sexual orientation and the intersection of the two. These poems are complex and often manage to be both cerebral and visceral. The author is inspired by the killings of unarmed black men and a local case of a black wrestler accused of killing others by deliberately infecting other men with HIV. Societal perceptions of race and sexuality are explored. The author also plays with form - both the physical layout and technical structure.

[reading is my hustle · Rating 3 out of 5]

the poems that i understood i liked quite a bit but this collection is esoteric. i still read the poems i didn't understand because the language was beautiful & i understood the tone, tenor, & gravity of subject matter.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Complex, clever but passionate poems. The indecency of living, of being black, of being gay, of being alive in a hostile world. Full of invented forms, each poem is a world unto itself but the cumulative power is intense. Poetry of its time for all time.

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

The city rears up:
white, white, lovely.
Inside, every room
mutates like a basic truth.

This is epic intersectionality--but much of the content rests on the awareness of such. This is the situation: black bodies defying trad. roles of black masculinity.
Cue a reference to the downlow.

I struggled with this. Very dense almost inscrutable images. There is also a strange use of parentheses and an almost-erasure of concepts.

[Chuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

I decided to check out all of this year's National Book Award poetry short-listers and this is one of the collections on that list. Deep, dark purple poetry from a black gay perspective that is so constantly inventive it is barely contained (or sometimes not contained at all) by Reed's endless experimentation with form. Beautifully literate and abrasively in-your-face rough but very real wake up calls. A gut punch of perspective on the world we live in from one who is doubly marginalized. Just when I'd want to give up on a poem, a diamond made of one or two lines would emerge. Can't wait to see how Reed evolves.

[Crystal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read a lot of poetry audiobooks and this was, by far, one of the best I've ever heard. This collection has such a musicality that becomes apparent when you hear the author read the poems aloud. Also, there was some play with sound effects (layering?) that was never cheesy or overwhelming but instead gave new depth to the poems it was used on. This audiobook was a joy to listen to and I look forward to Reed's next collection.

[Téa Jones-Yelvington · Rating 5 out of 5]

f***ing amazing

[miranda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, this was very powerful and experiential. There were a few poems here and there where I thought the message was a bit lost, but I enjoyed this collection! The way he utilizes shape in poems was really fantastic.

[Verónica Fleitas Solich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raw
A blow to the throat

[juch · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm back to work so this won't be as long or thorough as the other ones, I think, but that's also because this collection was incredible and at the same time difficult to access. On one level, I mean this in a basic sense -- I frequently had to check a dictionary, Google a linguistics reference -- but also in some other sense that I'm having trouble articulating. Maybe I'll chew through it as I type this review.

The voice felt harsh, cold, closed, solitary, but surging with emotion -- anger (often at people's capacities to move on so easily from others', specifically black/queer, trauma), fear, loneliness, others. A really compelling and kind of scarily bitter/intelligent voice. Reminded me of the narrator from Teju Cole's Open City. Not that there aren't moments of warmth, solidarity, like "Carolina Prayer": "Let us smell rain. Let the breeze through an oak hymn / the promise that keeps us waking." Though that comes with its own darkness, right before: "Let the cop car / swerve its nose into the night and not see none of them" -- the hint of violence, a curse, in "swerve."

Reed uses the second person in this really interesting way, one that identifies the reader with his voice, but also implicates/accuses us: "You pile the less / pleasant bits of news / easily through all the sleep / and line the story of years" from "About A White City," the incredible "Retrograde" -- where the "you" feels angry at their neighbors for having loud sex, and at their own "vacuous erection / now making controversy of your spinal-wire tangle." I've been thinking a lot about anger this year, and it's also been all over the news -- mostly in the context of women's anger, people asking is it justified, is it useful. I read a little bit of Martha Nussbaum's Anger and Forgiveness, which argues that anger is useful only if it quickly transitions into something less harmful and more future-oriented. This position has been criticized for undervaluing anger and its role in resistance, particularly Black resistance. Next to the philosophical/political question of whether anger is justified/useful, I feel like what Reed's "you" shows is that anger is real, visceral. It can be cold, destructive; regardless, it is real. Bringing the reader into the "you" forces us to not ignore it, how we cause/feel it.

I don't know if that really makes sense. But that's my attempt to parse through things. A few other stray notes: the titles are incredible, every title I feel is not a direct reference to something in the poem, but something that adds more to it. The linguistics references -- and what he does visually with syntax, using slashes and brackets and bolds -- are so, so cool. I want to read a more knowledgeable person's review of this collection. And I want to return to it later, to really fully digest.

[Zee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not like this book.
I did not get this book.
I don't think this book was meant for me--and that's ok.
I think there's people it is meant for, and that they'll love it.
But to understand this book, you need to be woke on a level that I'm not. You need to be well-versed in social justice, you need to have a certain background to comprehend it or, like me, you'll be lost.
I am not the intended audience.
So in my eyes, this book came off as pretentious. It was inaccessible. It was unnecessarily graphic. 50% or more of the book made vague references that I didn't know and couldn't relate to. It was alienating. I was lost.
And to me, it didn't make sense. It made analogies that I don't understand the logic behind. It jumps from point A to point F when it makes arguments, and if you haven't already gotten from A to F on any situation before, it all will go right over your head and look slightly crazy.
That was my experience with this poetry collection.
So, yeah, no, I didn't like it.
But I can see how other people will.

[Dree · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection focuses on life as a gay black man in America. I found the second half to be more poignant than the first--but maybe I got used to his style? Reed uses space on the page and word positioning very effectively. I liked this collection, though there were some poems I did not understand.

In the notes, he reveals more about his inspirations for specific poems, as well as other works referenced. I ended up re-reading several of these poems, as the info in the notes helped make more sense of them. In the acknowledgements he reveals that these poems were written while in the grip of depression, which I got from my reading, though I would have doubted my interpretation without his mentioning it.

[Brittany · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't think a two-star rating is fair to this book. Rather, it is more reflective of my failure to grasp what Reed was really talking about. It reminded me of Night Sky with Exit Wounds which I said "It's lovely poetry and I can understand why others enjoy it, but I don't think I really "got" it."

"His thumb heavy in the novel of my body kept my spine from snapping shut."

"Does it make me more or less of a top? a subordinate clause? which position privileges parataxis? in what design do I hold power?"

[Adam Lowy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The deep art of these days.//The city rears up:/white,white, lovely./Inside, every room/mutates like a basic truth."


"The men are machines. The white/engine assembled a sincere/ crack in the silence./This churning sucks up the day./The violent muck is quite other."

Images, perceptions of the body, in sex and violence. How to protect ( from potential victimizers, police etc.) and then gain possession of bodily self.

Wonderful poet!

[Shaun · Rating 5 out of 5]

The very best poetry is being written by young men and women of color and this book proves it once again. A few years ago, Claudia Rankine wrote an awesome collection of poetry and essays called “Citizen” about the “black experience” in America. It blew me away! It was so incredibly well written. I actually made it a point to go see the installment called “Hood” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art solely because of Claudia Rankine’s incredible work in “Citizen.” The same can be said of Justin Phillip Reed’s work in his first collection of poetry and “wordsmithing” entitled “Indecency”. This shite is that good!

At times, every poet’s work is a bit obtuse and far out there; too far out there. Justin Philip Reed’s work is like that at times, but once you know a bit about the back story or to whom or about whom the poem is written, you see how so freaking talented the poet is with forming and shaping his or her words. That J.P. Reed suffers PTSD because he is guilty of being “black in modern America” that has declared a secret war on the rights of young men and women of color is simply without peradventure. His work screams about the murder of his young black soul merely by being alive and living on the mean streets of St. Louis. I have been there and I have seen the oppression J.P. Reed writes about with the “whites” of my very own eyes. Prejudice, race baiting and hatred run rampant in the people and neighborhoods in those parts of St. Louis J.P. Reed writes about in this collection of his first 38 poems. Each one is more strident and shocking than the next. It was and is impossible to pick the very best, they are each that good.

American men and women of letters, especially those of color, are the proverbial “parakeets in the soul-killing mine” of our great nation. America, we have much to discuss, much to address and much to atone for. Justin Phillip Reed’s work here captures so eloquently the street argot, anguish and urgency of America’s black men; especially gay black men of which Reed, as in the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song says we should do, let’s his “freak flag fly.”

Ironically, the state of American poetry is still exceptionally high, indeed as long as we fail to address the evils we have wrought on our brothers and sisters of color. There is so much art, big, juicy bits of it, out there for all to see and experience. It is a sad, but nevertheless fortunate place to be if you are as talented as Justin Phillip Reed and Claudia Rankine. I hope they both live long, productive lives. They both bring so much to the table and make living in modern 21st Century America so painfully exquisite. Long may ye reign!

[Basia · Rating 5 out of 5]

How much work are we wiling to do when a poem doesn't reveal its core to the reader after a first, second, or third read? And how can we maintain the joyfulness that reading poetry brings, even when a poem is "hard"? When a poet offers something we perceive as a challenge, and we turn away because of it, what kind of reader does that make us?

I'm not new to poetry, and even I will say many of the poems in Indecency require more patience than some other work I've encountered, including some favorites by other contemporary poets. But it doesn't feel right to take stars off the rating for that. And it seems a bit lazy to give up and say something like, "This book isn't for me" and cease trying to enjoy, understand and really read it. And it feels especially unfair to call the collection "alienating" or whatever.

I was listening to a podcast in which JPR was reading from Indecency at Greenlight Bookstore with Angel Nafis and Jayson P. Smith. He said something about allowing himself some selfishness when writing and not thinking so much about how readers will react to a poem. This is something I believe to be especially crucial for poets relegated to the periphery of what/who matters in this country and in this world. And I celebrate JPR's commitment to prioritizing himself, even if it means the poems are tough. I mean, even while Angel Nafis was expressing such serious adoration for the poems and a desire to teach these poems, she herself admitted she doesn't always get what's happening in these poems. And this doesn't have to detract from the experience of reading them!

JPR also talked about focusing on the music of language in his work, which is something I often find myself migrating towards when the other layers of a poem (a peculiar image, a weird metaphor, the basic gist) aren't so readily available. And Indecency was so full of this music, and this became so clear and wonderful when I heard the poems read aloud. And then I enjoyed the sound of what I did not yet understand. And then I wasn't hung up on my slowness to understand. And then I admired the poems more, and differently.

I'll be rereading this collection many times, I'm sure, and I'm looking forward to doing so. Its density is a reward that promises more to glean from it each time.

[Neva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some truly moving poems dealing with race and being gay, but others felt just out of grasp.

[Cru · Rating 5 out of 5]

Horror cinema in poetry & other amazing things

[Laurel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely amazing collection

[Sammy Williams · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t have much to say about Indecency. This definitely falls in the category of poetry I just didn’t really understand.

[Anne Elise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible collection, eager to continue returning to this for awhile

[Nathan Albright · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, it can be said of this book at least that its title is not false advertising, although the book is indecent at least as much for its politics as for its whining about sexuality.  Indeed, this book could have stood to be fare more indecent in the sense of being indelicate than it is, because that would have been an improvement over the author's self-obsessed naval gazing about his own identity and what it means.  This book has no business being as bad as it is, or the sort of bad that it is, and the fact that most of the works in this poem were previously published and that this book managed to win a National Book Award suggests the sort of cultural malaise that we face as a society.  Whoever voted for this book to win the National Book Award, it should be noted, should lose their ability to vote for anything ever again, as I wouldn't trust their opinion on who should be a dog catcher.  This book is that bad, bad enough that I have a lot less faith in the good sense of the many poetic magazines and journals that published the poems contained in this book.

This particular book is a selection of poetic whines, often done with experimentation on the amount of white space around the words, that ends up being 69 pages long (probably no coincidence there).  The poet talks about his supposed warped masculinity (probably toxic in some fashion), then contradicts himself by talking about the woman he is not, reflects on boyhood, laments any unkindness, complains about whiteness, and so on.  The author rambles on about what he wishes and what he feels and what he thinks, assuming that the reader will care about the poet being mainly interested in himself and not very interested in those who are not like him.  The author even muses on the question of consent, thinking that it is unusual that the gay community does not dwell on the question of consent or that the problem of consent as it relates to gay men in sex work is not often considered.  In general questions of consent and sex work are more than a little murky, it must be admitted.  Other than that, there's little in this book that does more than dwell on the author's own concerns and preoccupations.

What sort of worth does this book of poetry have?  It is obvious that those who agree with the author's poetry would appreciate his work, but I don't agree with any of the author's politics.  The author's identity politics is whiny pro-homosexual, anti-police, pro-antifa sorts of politics that I have no truck with.  The author's other politics are equally abhorrent to me.  And it didn't have to be this way.  The author is certainly someone who is well-read, as his poems include a lot of references to other works, be it journalism or the works of other (better) writers.  The author is well-read enough that were he interested in removing his head from his colon he could likely write in at least passable form--given the experimentation the book shows--in ways that would be interesting and worthy of appreciation for people who did not share his own perspective, but the author is intent on only writing to and for people who agree with the author and who share the same sort of self-absorbed preoccupation that the author does with questions of identity and leftist politics.  As someone who has no particularly fondness for that sort of thing this book leaves me with nothing to appreciate, because the poems are worthless apart from one's agreement with the author's worldview, which in my case is nonexistent.

[Caleb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've wrestled with rating and reviewing "Indecency" by Justin Phillip Reed for a lot of reasons. Principally, as a whole the book is overwhelmingly cerebral. Reed writes as an obvious (and devote) academic of poetry which comes across almost arrogant to a poet who believes that poetry should be accessible to all readers. Or, poetry should mean what it reads. After a lot of consideration and commiserations with other reviewers, I think that maybe Reed does present poetry that means what it reads. Even if it's form is experimental and unconventional, the substance is stitched together with uncanny precision that demands careful reading.

It is also always uncomfortable judging experience, and Reed's work is replete with the experience of being a queer person of color. There is an anger in "Indecency" that I think any marginalized reader will be familiar with. It is an anger that Reed masterfully extends beyond himself to present a mosaic of injustice. Perhaps most striking is the way in which Reed is unapologetic in displaying the violence of cultural appropriation, rape, poverty, etc. And what begins as a seemingly cerebral jumble of graduate vernacular quickly becomes a visceral house of mirrors. Here is the beauty of poetry, connection in experiences drastically alien to your own.

While I wouldn't classify "Indecency" as my regular cup of tea, like any good book worthy of five stars, it fundamentally opened my mind to something different. Often my eyes would begin to gloss over and skim stanzas, but when forced to follow the curvature of each letter again I found myself gasping at the ingenuity of Reed's poems. Truthfully, much of the work is still beyond me and I think it will take a couple ventures into Reed's spiraling form to give me any confidence in a review beyond "READ THIS!"

[Diana Marie Denza · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent collection of poetry by a poet who is clearly much smarter than I am. There were quite a few poems (especially near the middle of the book) that I simply couldn't wrap my head around entirely. Even so, I walked away feeling like I was inside Justin Phillip Reed's head, feeling his emotions. That sh*t is powerful. As a whole, Reed's collection examines the intersection of race and queerness in America, grappling with issues like white supremacy, police brutality, child abuse, dating, disease, longing, etc. These are heavy topics for any poet to explore, especially in a debut collection, but Reed does it with grace, power, and profound uniqueness.

I'm no poetry expert, but the below poems were defining moments in this collection for me. They deal with the plight of black girls and women in this country, modern-day racial segregation, black queerness, living in a white supremacist society that doesn't see you as your own person, and police brutality.
"Pushing Up Onto Its Elbows, The Fable Lifts Itself Into Fact."
"Gateway"
"To Every F*ggot Who Pulverized Me for Being a F*ggot"
"The Fratricide"
"Paroxysm"

Even if it feels frustrating sometimes, or you need to take breaks, read this collection (two or three times if you have to!). It is necessary reading.

[BookChampions · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read most of these award-winning poems walking through the Delmar Loop, making for an especially visceral experiences. I felt these poems in my body—poems about about the violences and absences we carry in our guts and must learn to expunge. Justin Phillip Reed is also a St. Louis poet and a National Book Award winner who I heard speak in a very intimate setting the day after I finished the book, bringing the words to a special way.

"You've grown so accustomed / to mereness that what you call a life no longer houses the sublime." That's the line that is resonating most right now, especially in light of finishing Brave Face this morning. Thankfully these poems are a kind of lyrical architecture (wildly creative in their structure!) that shelter the kinds of questions we must continue to ask about our own worth, about justice, about sexuality, about depression, and about resistance.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the last two years it feels as though that being anything other than a straight white man has been under assault in this country. This small collection of poetry attempts to express in words the pent up anger and frustration that being an “other” in America feels like. Not all of the poetry lands as Mr. Reed is a little too experimental for my tastes at times. However, a couple of the poems such as “The Fratricide,” “Consent,” and “The Day _______ Died” make a real statement about race and gender relations in the present. This collection may not have some of my favorite poems, but a few do make you sit up and take notice.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

So very very good.