Work

 

SELECTED WORKS

POETRY

CHAPBOOK: to be in & of (Palette Poetry, August 2023)

 

ACADEMIC RESEARCH, POLICY REPORTS, AND ESSAYS

PANELS, READINGS, and TALKS

 

“Putting More Poetry Into Politics” is a profile of Joshua as the featured poet in the Fall/Winter issue of the UCLA Journal for Radiation Oncology (Nov. 2023), which describes the chapbook as “21 stunning poems that comprise [his] debut are vital to both poetry and politics. His poems do not shy away from loss, but they also do not dwell there. From the parable-like “As the Prairie Burns” to the 3-poem series, “Leftovers,” Aiken invites the reader to explore with him what love and loss and freedom could mean…He is choosing not to disappear or be disappeared. He is choosing to never judge another on the worst thing they’ve done. He is inviting us to join him. And this is precisely why you’ll be hearing about and reading work from Joshua Aiken for decades to come.“

 

 

 

Read Joshua’s latest essay “The Armed Individual, Black Life, and the Race for New Social Worlds“ for the Brooklyn Rail (Nov. 2023)

[T]he notion that “anything can happen” names how Black premature death involves a “racial calculus” that shapes, politically, who is marked as disposable. The reality that anything could happen, and that what happens next is not a foregone conclusion, illuminates how state-facilitated racialized harms—police violence, imposed vulnerability, and a legal apparatus designed to individualize collective injuries—are the conditions of possibility for American social life.

to be in & of (2022)

Joshua’s poetry debut, to be in & of, was selected by Judge Chen Chen as the winner of the 2022 Palette Poetry Chapbook Prize and is available for purchase on Bookshop (support independent bookstores!), Possible Futures (Josh’s favorite New Haven independent bookspace!), Barnes & Nobles and Amazon.

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 this healing really for?” With a sense of queer fury and alienation from the world as it is, to be in & of gives voice to speakers concerned with the ‘costs’ of ‘getting better’, the meaning of freedom, and the politics of how we stay alive.