Intricate, intimate, difficult, and confrontational poems that push at the boundaries of selfhood, skin, culture, sexuality, and blood.

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.

The Malevolent Volume explores the myths and transformations of Black being, on a continuum between
the monstrous and the sublime.

Subverting celebrated classics of poetry and mythology and examining horrors from contemporary film and cultural
fact, National Book Award winner Justin Phillip Reed engages darkness as an aesthetic to conjure the revenant animus
that lurks beneath the exploited civilities of marginalized people. In these poems, Reed finds agency in the otherthan-human identities assigned to those assaulted by savageries of the state. In doing so, he summons a retaliatory,
counterviolent Black spirit to revolt and to inhabit the revolting.