Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Sho
    Sho
    Sho
    Ebook92 pages47 minutes

    Sho

    By Douglas Kearney

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY


    Eschewing series and performative typography, Douglas Kearney’s Sho aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks. Navigating the complex penetrability of language, these poems are sonic in their espousal of Black vernacular traditions, while examining histories, pop culture, myth, and folklore. Both dazzling and devastating, Sho is a genius work of literary precision, wordplay, farce, and critical irony. In his “stove-like imagination,” Kearney has concocted poems that destabilize the spectacle, leaving looky-loos with an important uncertainty about the intersection between violence and entertainment.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWave Books
    Release dateJan 18, 2022
    ISBN9781950268627
    Sho
    Author

    Douglas Kearney

    DOUGLAS KEARNEY is a poet, performer, and librettist. He is the author of Patter and The Black Automaton. He lives in Los Angeles. SETH ABRAMSON is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of five books, including Thievery, winner of the Akron Poetry Prize, and Northerners, winner of the Green Rose Prize. He will be teaching at the University of New Hampshire in the fall. JESSE DAMIANI was the 2013–2014 Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Fulbright Commission. He also lives in Los Angeles.

    Related to Sho

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      from BLACK PASTORAL

      Nov 1, 2023

      somewheres, some lifetimes ago I have run so far, so long.There is nowhere I haven’t beenBut here, in this field, a bodyLength from the ragged brinkThat gives way to forest.I collapsed here, the thin, hard slipOf me whittled at both ends.I want badly

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2021

      It is all, allover the earth, underearth, a graveyard: tree ferns, trees—roots,bark, seeds—ancientlife that emerged from the sea, forestsflooded to swamps& bogs, transformed to peat, transformedagain, sunk, coveredwith layers of earth with strangeamp

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Diaspora Sonnets

      Sep 1, 2022

      The old men drink their spritzers and gossipunder awnings. Red hued and blustery, like two roosters on the side of a road.Skyward they crane their necks and laugh, sometimes they wonder about kings and future kingsand how the muscles peer from their

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Five Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      Five Poems
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Devil Asks Why You Would Mouth The Word Pity

      Jul 1, 2022

      even in this abundance of dark? Even in this abundance of dark you have totake the stars on faith. Look: Under today’s dim sky there is a basket.In that basket there is a fish. Come night, you are the animal that will eat the best parts of it. And ye

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Bone-tough Throat

      Nov 1, 2021

      Books God of Nothingness by Mark Wunderlich Graywolf, 96 pages, 2021 Paperback, $16.00 My father fell from the boat.His balance had been poor for some time.He had gone out in the boat with his doghunting ducks in a marsh near Trempealeau, Wisconsin.N

      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems

      Mar 15, 2022

      a ghost is hangingfrom the doorpostof our past— can you see it?it has wounds—it’s bleedingyears from its mouth [.] when we left ourhouses that aprilit was for history’s pleasure— twice the war wasin far-flung townsthen it grew a light foot and veered

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2021

      the billboard says blue lives matterand you think why can’t white peoplecome up with anything original you let your eyes drown in the aqua and navybackground surrounding the shield shaped badge blue like the sky dotted with cloudsvoluminous as cotton

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Toward A Unified Theory

      Jan 1, 2022

      Condemned to live inside the weatherof our moods What are you doing? Filling this bucket with waterand dumping it into the water They can’t excavate the amphitheater further because it extends backbeneath the houses We close their eyes not for thembu

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Poems

      Nov 1, 2023

      for Brenda Shaughnessy The news isn’t good, and neither of us feelslike pretending, though the list of what we hope forgrows longer by the day. More news, goodor otherwise, everything witnessed by the lightof fires, and something we cherished alwaysb

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2021

      I spent all my avocado moneyby the light of Saint Martin de PorresI often think about bank robberyWhat wig I would wear, what fun it would beto harm no one and dump a million dollarsover the hills that belong to everyonefrom an airplane that I teach

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      What Living In A House Is Like

      May 1, 2022

      Standing in each stanza—no, I’m sorry—room. Standing in each room waslike standing in a tester stroke of wall paint. All these blobs of colors in rows and columns, the size of thumbs.Together—a portrait of potential. But blues leaped to yellow leaped

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Six Sonnets

      Jan 1, 2021

      Goldenrod, I could say, you know, everybody wants somethingfrom me, but, well, everybody wants something and nobody wantsnothing from me, goldenrod, towhead, beast. Goldenrod, you packthe meadows like gold-plated sardines. I have heart palpitationsbu

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems

      Jul 1, 2023

      nothing so lonely as the hospitalbed. nothing so lonely as beinglonely in the hospital bed. nothingso jargoned as the body sproutingbrush tuber cannula or rue. nothingso pure as the abstracted by which Imean exploded body, the body thatholds its skin

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Ceremony

      Sep 6, 2022

      It was something. Out of nowhere, I didn’t give a shit about anything for like a month. Like nothing. I mean yeah, there’d been plenty of times where I didn’t give a shit about something. Oh that thing? Yeah, fuck that thing. I did it all the time. M

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Think What a Poem Might Do: A Conversation with Jill Bialosky and Matthew Zapruder

      Aug 17, 2017

      What, if anything, do you think poetry can do for us in these difficult times? The post Think What a Poem Might Do: A Conversation with Jill Bialosky and Matthew Zapruder appeared first on The Millions.

      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Where To Start With Louise Glück, Winner Of The 2020 Nobel Prize In Literature

      Oct 14, 2020

      The Swedish Academy has awarded this year's Nobel Prize in literature to Louise Gluck, a former U.S. poet laureate. The 16th woman to win the prestigious prize and the first American woman since Toni Morrison in 1993, Gluck is the author of 12 poetry

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Learning From Poetic Closure

      Jan 1, 2022

      In the 1980s while scholars were obsessed with theory, I was in a course of study, Japanese language and literature, that barely seemed touched by such heady stuff. Fortunately, one professor offered a graduate class designed to familiarize us with B

      14 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Letter from Lafayette Square

      Dec 7, 2021

      One Sunday in February my mom telephones at eight in the morning to remind me that the bishop of Maryland is coming to Saint James at Lafayette Square, the African American Episcopal church where I was baptized and confirmed. There will be a single s

      15 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      I’ve seen enough films where a character nickshimself shaving or maybe has a bread knife slip and the thinrun of blood is supposed to stand for some violence,for something he did and is desperateto cover up, but the truth will out—I’ve seen enough th

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Dreaming Up Her Own Salvation

      Oct 11, 2023

      Dreaming Up Her Own Salvation
      14 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      i look like someonehealing from an accidentbecause i am someonehealing from an accidentthe book of actsscales falling from saul’s eyesremembering my capacityfor stillnesshow long can i sitwithout looking awaythe fear of god escapingi desperately need

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Poems

      Nov 1, 2021

      The afterlife is an infinity of custom shelving, where everything you have ever loved has a perfect place, including things that don’t fit on shelves, like the weeping willow from your parents’ backyard, or an old boyfriend, exactly as he was in your

      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2020

      She was a security guard and even though her uniform was black I could seeIt was covered in blood, the marble floor was covered in blood, it wasSlowly pooling out from the space where HER HAND used to beOh my god, I said, then I started to say, YOUR

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      AgentAdvice

      Oct 13, 2021

      I received five full manuscript requests from top agents after sending queries about my debut fiction manuscript starting in the summer of 2020. While I’m normally a patient person, this is how long I’ve been waiting for responses: 256 days, 254 days

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      What We Are Carrying

      Oct 12, 2022

      WHEN I was ten I wanted to learn to play the clarinet and eventually join the school band. But (or And, or So—) my father found an affordable, used, kid-sized accordion, somehow found a tutor, and that, plus his moving the whole family to an air forc

      12 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      There are not enough hours in the day before I have to perform affection. That’s an objectively robotic thing to say, my therapist tells me, when I speakabout my responses to sentimentality. My weekly battle with the laser printer—a kind of intimacy,

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Sho

    5/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Sho - Douglas Kearney

      1

      COME BACK STRIKING WHAT’S ABOVE

      BUCK

      Seems some want some body bodied into street sweet meat.

      Come and go get it!

      We may not fight it but you’d like us to, too. Tool cocked back to make a no-way way you kick yourself in us. Umber-husked, our dirty look a dirty talk, begging for the something strong in your dom palm what smokes after doing it.

      You order us scream the shut up.

      You ever never hanker for surrender, so the hard:

      cuff rough or stick licks.

      Such a hurry! Look:

      don’t sweat,

      don’t fret.

      You’ve ever done this before—

      just fudge we’re not real,

      too dark here to tell.

      Let’s role:

      they were fondling for my piece and finger banging a cash-box peeped through convenient ballistic glass and face-lumped assed-out lawned till they popped the juice came out them once their cig resisted lunged shiv-ish fit to shoot shot while the woofers woofed their thick trap beats,

      you said. And:

      wanted usin buck so buck us goodwe’ll buckup after by candlelight, flower petalsand we shallwe shalllike fucking champs, we. Oh, you’re some machine ain’t you justall up in it so we gotto be down, up to here.

      WELL

      I can’t reckon, so I shake my head

      to a woolie of ears and shut eye continu

      -um. But I come to what I must want to be

      : a well.

      By I I mean to call we,

      by we mean what’s at the bottom

      of what I want to be—but that’s not just

      so.

      Well, I could find myself

      a mountaintop to get to, to there on. Would I

      then rung down myself to that stood water,

      to what’s drowned down in it

      —by which I mean us

      us

      us

      PROPERTY VALUES

      I aspire to be a CVS: Lord, I wanna be

      a drugstore inna my heart—.

      Or a nice NEIGHBORhood,

      a rapless gas-up—

      inna my heart—a legit ballot—

      I perspire all night at it.

      That my sweat, alchemical—

      of shit, makes gold? Factual.

      Consider spent plantation dirt,

      arena turf, recording booth—

      what transmogrifies these

      sans my properties?

      If it could it should it’s been bottled?

      Me, I transude this solvent

      sun up to—

      you

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1