Praise for Indecency

Winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry
Finalist for the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
A BCALA 2019 Honor Best Poetry Award winner
A Library Journal Best Book of 2018

“[Reed’s] poems take up the body in desire and violence, and they do so by thrusting the reader into a stark visceral encounter with their material.” —The New York Times

“Raw, nervy, reverberant, densely packed language whose import simply can’t be reduced to easy explanation . . . One-of-a-kind brilliant.” —Library Journal

“[A] visceral and teasingly cerebral debut.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Reed’s poems are formally inventive, especially when he works in concrete ways on the page. . . . The reader winds up in a new place without realizing they were being moved there.” —The Rumpus

“A poignant, searing book.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Rich with musical echoes and sonic ironies.” —Vulture

“Reed wrestles with finding the language to convey the pain of that double oppression and still manages to create terrible beauty.” —Signature

“In his debut poetry collection, Indecency, [Reed] wrestles with self-perception, intimacy, and placement.” —St. Louis Magazine

“An unflinching exploration of power, race, sexuality, gender, the personal and the political.” —Vox

“Reed’s deft craft is so rare, so precise, and driven by language whose surface is texture like teeth, that it seems like freed speech into the ache of repressive histories, white gazes, and uninvited invasions. . . . Indecency is the new duende. It is like no other book I’ve read; Reed is an extraordinary talent.” —Dawn Lundy Martin

“Indecency is a refusal of pretense, a celebration of possibilities within human complexity—and the hard-earned freedom inextricable from the public and private histories from which it is wrought.” —Khadijah Queen

“Don’t avert: Justin Phillip Reed demands we witness that who’s missing was taken, who fell was dropped, and who died was murdered. . . .Fuck what they claim; here’s what Reed has seen.” —Douglas Kearney