These poets confront the trauma of the past—the personal past and the shared past—while celebrating desire and love. Ugly Music, the debut collection from Diannely Antigua, explores reality, dream, trauma, and obsession, and how to create an identity informed by and in spite of the past. Jericho Brown’s The Tradition, longlisted for the National Book Award, details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal in poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma. Malcolm Tariq’s debut, Heed the Hollow, explores the concept of “the bottom” across blackness, sexuality, and the American South in poems that reckon with a lineage of trauma while searching for beauty and love. Moderated by Erika Stevens, poetry editor at Coffee House Press.
