Present Continuous

by David Grundy

'Present Continuous' is a collection of hybrid essays, written during the recent covid pandemic, moving between criticism and poetic prose, between visual and textual expressions of the present moment and a future that still has a past to resolve. From the initial announcement of the lockdown to Black Lives Matter protests to a “second wave” of restrictions and the issue of police violence, Grundy’s writing offers, in the words of Richard Owens, “a quality, a shade of incredible intelligence and intuitive imagining that cannot be reproduced”.

"The world in art and poetry will begin with a world anew", commented the late musician and poet Henry Grimes. In these "expositions of harmony and theory", David Grundy strives to imagine that new world.

220 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2022

About the author

David Grundy is the author of A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and Never By Itself Alone: Queer Poetry, Queer Communities in Boston and the Bay Area, 1944—Present (Oxford University Press, 2024) and coeditor, with Lauri Scheyer, of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan University Press, 2023). He co-runs the poetry small press Materials/Materialien.