STOP AND FRISK: AMERICAN POEMS by Jabari Asim
Description
Through this sparsely adorned collection of dramatic monologues, Jabari Asim ruthlessly interrogates entrenched injustice and its insidious echoes. Part rap sheet, part concept album, Asim lays down tracks that add conviction to our collective broken record: What could be more American than pretending truths were self-evident when they seldom were? Drawing defiant inspiration from the news and the Blues, these poems arrest our attention and burn grooves into us. Like bare bulbs swinging in windowless rooms, Asim’s poems offer little solace. Their keening is inescapable, interrupting our piped-in playlists. Without the pretense of safety, Stop and Friskplays for keeps. These starkly revelatory poems expose the dark heart of our nation and call for a reckoning—the only way out before everything breaks / into hurt, noise, and ever after.
photo by Shef Reynolds II
About the author
Jabari Asim is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts and the author of seven books for adults—including We Can’t Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival—and ten books for children. His poems are included in several anthologies, including Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present;Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the 21st Century; and Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art. After more than a decade at the St. Louis Post-Dispatchand The Washington Post, he now directs the MFA program at Emerson College.