Winner of the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful--the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.
Justin Phillip Reed was born and raised in South Carolina. His work appears in African American Review, Best American Essays, Callaloo, the Kenyon Review, Obsidian, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. The author of the chapbook A History of Flamboyance (YesYes Books, 2016), he has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Conversation Literary Festival. He lives in St. Louis.
