When Rap Spoke Straight To God

A book-length poem navigating belief, black lives, the tragedies of Trump, and the boundaries of being a woman. "When Rap Spoke Straight to God is utterly transporting. In language both elevated and slangy, saucy and tender, Dawson lovingly weaves the reader around her finger.” —Jennifer Egan When Rap Spoke Straight to God isn’t sacred or profane, but a chorus joined in a single soliloquy, demanding to be heard. There’s Wu-Tang and Mary Magdelene with a foot fetish, Lil’ Kim and a self-loving Lilith. Slurs, catcalls, verses, erasures—Dawson asks readers, “Just how far is it to nigger?” Both grounded and transcendent, the book is reality and possibility. Dawson’s work has always been raw; but, When Rap Spoke Straight to God is as blunt as the answer to that earlier question: “Here.” Sometimes abrasive and often abraded, Dawson doesn’t flinch. A mix of traditional forms where sonnets mash up with sestinas morphing to heroic couplets, When Rap Spoke Straight to God insists that while you may recognize parts of the poem’s world, you can’t anticipate how it will evolve. With a literal exodus of light in the book’s final moments, When Rap Spoke Straight to God is a lament for and a celebration of blackness. It’s never depression; it’s defiance—a persistent resistance. In this book, like Wu-Tang says, the marginalized “ain’t nothing to f--- with.”

An award-winning quarterly, Tin House started in 1999, the singular love child of an eclectic literary journal and a beautiful glossy magazine. Our fall issue will be packing stories, essays, and poems inspired by poison pens, poison pills, and general-use poisons. But don't worry, reading is the antidote, too. Featuring Elisa Albert, Melissa Febos, Ethan Rutherford, Shane McCrae, Deb Olin Unferth, and more.

Fiftieth Anniversary edition of a revolutionary book that still stuns with its prophetic, political, and stylistic force

The candid poems in Gianna Russo's One House Down are grounded in experiences of ambivalence and oneness, not unlike those we sometimes find in true love. Russo ruminates on the past and scrutinizes the present in her hometown of Tampa with honest affection, concern, anger and delight. She asks an essential question: How can we treasure a place whose history and values have sometimes supported injustice? And if those wrongs are still evident today--then what? With family roots in Tampa that go back over a century, Russo skillfully pursues an answer in these inventive, surprising poems.

'Big-Eyed Afraid' is a fast-paced, breathlessly witty and illuminating riff on the multiple effects of race, sex, biology and social pressure on who we are and how we see ourselves. Dawson's dazzling rhymes, her perfect pitch for an array of idioms ranging from the smutty to the sacred, and her extraordinary combination of metrical control and jazz-like syntactical elaboration make her work feel at one and the same time chiselled and improvised, traditional and utterly distinct. Brilliantly alert to multiple influences yet irreducibly tied to this particular poet at this particular moment in our collective history, Big-Eyed Afraid is one of the most compelling and entertaining books of poetry I've read in I don't know how long.'- Alan Shapiro 'Erica Dawson is the most exciting younger poet I've seen in years. What drive and verve! Even in lines under tight control, she can sound reckless. Her dazzling wit informs poem after poem, making each seem like a stiff drink with a dash of bitters. 'Big-Eyed Afraid' is a sensational debut. I can't recall finding this much energy between two covers since Ariel.- X. J. Kennedy Erica Dawson was born in Columbia, Maryland in 1979. After earning her Master of Fine Arts from Ohio State University in 2006, she moved to the University of Cincinnati, where she is pursuing a PhD in English and Comparative Literature as the Elliston Fellow in Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Blackbird, Sewanee Theological Review, Southwest Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She has been awarded several fellowships and prizes, including the Academy of American Poets Prize at Ohio State University. She also took second place in the 2004 Morton Marr Poetry Prize.

Writing into the wounds and reverberations of the Israel/Palestine conflict, Philip Metres’ fourth book of poems, Shrapnel Maps, is at once elegiac and activist, an exploratory surgery to extract the slivers of cartography through palimpsest and erasure. A wedding in Toura, a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, uneasy interactions between Arab and Jewish neighbors in University Heights, the expulsion of Palestinians in Jaffa, another bombing in Gaza: Shrapnel Maps traces the hurt and tender places, where political noise turns into the voices of Palestinians and Israelis. Working with documentary flyers, vintage postcards, travelogues, cartographic language, and first person testimonies, Shrapnel Maps ranges from monologue sonnets to prose vignettes, polyphonics to blackouts, indices to simultaneities, as Palestinians and Israelis long for justice and peace, for understanding and survival.

"hell of birds is ferocious in its energy and acrobatics. With arresting images and unexpected enjambment, the poems twist and turn, often coming to a halt so surprising, you're left reeling in the white space, out of breath. Kimberly writes, "One day the world will sing through your blood." After reading this collection, you'll feel the earth in your bones." -Erica Dawson, author of When Rap Spoke Straight to God "You've not read a collection like hell of birds before. This is wild new work by a poet with a vision and a voice-and with wings. The rapture is contagious: it's our lives. These poems net all of it-the heaven and the hell of it in these fearless and music-filled poems." -Laura Kasischke, National Book Critics Circle Award Winner

Fiction. Is Jeffers an Alligator Zoo-Park magician or the Messiah? Two friends live unapologetically on the edge of poverty in the rugged, un-decorous part of the South. Jimmy, a single father with an addict ex, and Jeffers, a magician whose tricks are closer to miracles--both are immersed in a place where trailers and Hot Pockets dominate the landscape, and alligators roam free. When Jimmy witnesses "losing" his best friend to his biggest trick gone awry, he reflects on their lifelong friendship and what it really means to escape. "C.H. Hooks' mesmerizing novel, ALLIGATOR ZOO-PARK MAGIC, hovers in the boundaries between city boys and country boys, businessmen and truck drivers, a van named NAILR and a radiator-busting deer drinking beer. The world is both nature untamed and twisted in a theme park of mermaids and crispy-fried reptile bites. Yet, Hooks does so much more than create a new spin on the mystical, mythical South. This fascinating debut delves into the true nature of the heart: everyone's need to belong to someone, to some place, and, most importantly, to oneself."--Erica Dawson "Mr. Hooks has produced a magic show of the highest order."--Jensen Beach "I've died and been born anew! C.H. Hooks is a damned wizard, and ALLIGATOR ZOO-PARK MAGIC is a holy hell of a book."--Harrison Scott Key "AZPM is in the best tradition of Southern literature--it's fast and funny, dark and desperate."--Shane Hinton "Draw a direct line from Larry Brown and Harry Crews to Chris Hooks."--Jeff Parker