WINNER OF THE INAUGURAL PALETTE POETRY CHAPBOOK PRIZE, SELECTED BY JUDGE CHEN CHEN
“To step into the gorgeous, dizzying cosmos of this chapbook is to declare “we’re raunchy, we’re righteous” to sing “we kissed, & for weeks nothing was my enemy,” and ultimately, to “invent a galaxy of sound.” – Chen Chen, final judge for Palette Chapbook Contest [winner of the Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, who’s most recent collection was selected as a 2023 American Library Association Notable Book For Adults]
“These poems are excellent, lyrically athletic, brazenly honest, as sound as they are shattering…I found myself shouting or stunned silent after every poem.” – Danez Smith[winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award]
“putting pressure on language like [Aiken] means to turn each word into coal & then burn it all down…there’s a phoenix rising from these ashes— & ready to fly.” – Evie Shockley [winner of Shelley Memorial Award and Lannan Poetry Prize, two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, who’s most recent collection was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry]
From Palette Poetry, to be in & ofis the debut chapbook of poet, anti-carceral advocate, and black studies scholar Joshua Aiken. Diving into the perils and contradictions of how black life is grieved in America, Aiken presses on the narratives of what it means to mourn, inherit, and belong. A meditation on family, loneliness, depression, and survivor’s guilt, these poems break open new ways of living within loss and interrogating: “So who is all this healing really for?” With a sense of queer fury and alienation from the world as it is, to be in & ofgives voice to speakers concerned with the ‘costs’ of ‘getting better’, the meaning of freedom, and the politics of how we stay alive. In the words of Contest Judge Chen Chen, to be in & of is a “collection full of wondering and wonderment” and “a constellation of poems spilling over with the vast aches of a heart so attuned to life, loss, and more life.” With poems written after poets like Essex Hemphill and Richard Siken, and for figures like the Godfather of House Music, DJ Frankie Knuckles, Aiken’s language bubbles over with the prospect of more life: the uncertainty, the unpromised, the shadows and ghosts, and the fierce joys, pleasures, and spaces that remind one of all that’s left unexplored. This debut invites its reader to be thoroughly entangled with the dead and the living; to delight in the messy process of belonging and becoming, and to experience the beauty of worlds one might someday know.
JOSHUA AIKEN 