We'll keep the cavalcade of congratulations going for one more day as we celebrate John Keene, winner of the 2022 Lammy Award in Gay Poetry from Lambda Literary for his latest, Punks: New and Selected Poems (The Song Cave).
The judging panel is not alone in their enthusiasm for Punks. Tyehimba Jess praised the book as "utterly brilliant," observing that "The range, vision, depth and humanity he brings to the page are as galactic as Banneker's astral wanderings, as crisp as the chordal cutting of a searching horn, as courageous and small as a nose wide open." He concludes, "Keene's masterfully inventive inquiry of self and history is queered, Blackened, and joyously thick with multitudes of voice and valence. Amen to this exploration!" Dawn Lundy Martin concurs, hailing the collection as "the gayest, most reverent homosexual book of poems I have read in decades." "It drips with ecstatic faggoty desire, sings a uniquely black love, and invokes Marlon Riggs' contention that 'every time we kiss, we confirm the new world coming,'" she continues, asserting that Punks "will make you want to fall in love with everything, including yourself."
While we don't have a PennSound author page for John Keene, he was one of 2019's Kelly Writers House Fellows, and on the KWH page for his visit, you can listen to his complete reading from the evening of February 11th and his Q&A session with Al Filreis from the following morning by clicking here.
