Some Are Drowning

by Reginald Shepherd

Winner of the 1993 Associated Writing Programs' Award Series in Poetry This poetry feels passionately truthful and his own, a gay young black man adrift between worlds, transcending the fragments of his life in song."--Poetry Flash

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Race

76 pages, Hardcover

First published January 6, 1994

About the author

Reginald Shepherd was the editor of The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press, 2004) and of Lyric Postmodernisms (Counterpath Press, 2008). He is the author of: Fata Morgana (2007), winner of the Silver Medal of the 2007 Florida Book Awards, Otherhood (2003), a finalist for the 2004 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Wrong (1999), Angel, Interrupted (1996), and Some Are Drowning (1994), winner of the 1993 Associated Writing Programs’ Award in Poetry (all University of Pittsburgh Press). Shepherd's work has appeared in four editions of The Best American Poetry and two Pushcart Prize anthologies, as well as in such journals as American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Yale Review. It has also been widely anthologized. He is also the author of Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry (Poets on Poetry Series, University of Michigan Press). Shepherd has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, the Florida Arts Council, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other awards and honors.

Reviews

[Punk · Rating 2 out of 5]

Free verse that deals in nature, slavery motifs, names—especially the unnamed and names that have been forgotten—the act of writing as recording/erasing identity, and queerness. Shepherd repeatedly returns to Greek mythology, as well, writing about the sirens, Narcissus, Bacchus, Ariadne, Psyche, Apollo, and the minotaur, among others. Some of it is just straight up about the myths, and the rest might be a metaphor, but who can say. I couldn't even parse most of this stuff at the sentence level.

This was Shepherd's first book of poetry, published in 1994, and it's fairly impenetrable, with syntax and line breaks that confound meaning, and not in a way I enjoyed, but there were a few pieces I liked: Crossing Cocytus, A Muse, Tantalus in May, Sebastian's Summer Poem, and Two or Three Things I Know About Him.

I checked out two other volumes by Shepherd, and I've started one published in 1999. It has the same themes, but it's already more accessible than this volume, and I'm enjoying it a lot more.

[Sarah Giragosian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shepherd's poems are always astonishing in their lyricism and intelligence. At once fierce and tender, his poems address climate change, racism, queer desire, and questions of aesthetics. One of my favorite poets.

[Janée Baugher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nice science-related poem on page 34, "Kindertotenlieder." Long-lined, great poetic leaps. The work is by an author who's clearly bright and extremely well-read. So sad that he perished to cancer.

[Calen Firedancing · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Erik Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

These shriven believers
have nailed me to their grotto, here with the sound
of water flowing underground. And if there were
the sound of water. My palimpsest, my blue-gilled
metaphor: I call you laurel, lyre,
trident, and charioteer. Shall I surrender now?
Agree. Disagree. Explain. O mountebank,
o spectral motion, conjunction of dissimilars,
I am drowning in your all-but-overwhelming drought,
I am searching for utopian desire.
I call you, thief of sleep, but you won't come for me.