The Selected Shepherd: Poems
Co-winner, The New York Times Best Poetry Books of 2024

Drawing from all six of his collections, The Selected Shepherd offers a new retrospective on the work of an important and sometimes controversial Black, gay poet. Although well known for his erotic poems about white men, Shepherd also wrote consistently about the natural world and its endangerment and his grief over his mother’s death. Presented in both publication order and the order in which they originally appeared within each collection, these poems highlight the most important themes of Shepherd’s work, along with both his predictability and unpredictability as a poet. Jericho Brown’s introduction provides additional context and insight on the life and work of this complex, groundbreaking figure in American poetry.
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The Selected Shepherd: Poems
Co-winner, The New York Times Best Poetry Books of 2024

Drawing from all six of his collections, The Selected Shepherd offers a new retrospective on the work of an important and sometimes controversial Black, gay poet. Although well known for his erotic poems about white men, Shepherd also wrote consistently about the natural world and its endangerment and his grief over his mother’s death. Presented in both publication order and the order in which they originally appeared within each collection, these poems highlight the most important themes of Shepherd’s work, along with both his predictability and unpredictability as a poet. Jericho Brown’s introduction provides additional context and insight on the life and work of this complex, groundbreaking figure in American poetry.
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The Selected Shepherd: Poems

The Selected Shepherd: Poems

The Selected Shepherd: Poems
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The Selected Shepherd: Poems

The Selected Shepherd: Poems

Overview

Co-winner, The New York Times Best Poetry Books of 2024

Drawing from all six of his collections, The Selected Shepherd offers a new retrospective on the work of an important and sometimes controversial Black, gay poet. Although well known for his erotic poems about white men, Shepherd also wrote consistently about the natural world and its endangerment and his grief over his mother’s death. Presented in both publication order and the order in which they originally appeared within each collection, these poems highlight the most important themes of Shepherd’s work, along with both his predictability and unpredictability as a poet. Jericho Brown’s introduction provides additional context and insight on the life and work of this complex, groundbreaking figure in American poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780822991403
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date: 04/09/2024
Series: Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 168
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

Reginald Shepherd (Author)
Reginald Shepherd (1963–2008) was a Black, gay poet who grew up in the Bronx and went on to receive two MFAs, one from Brown University and one from the Iowa Writers Workshop. He authored two collections of poetry criticism and six poetry collections, all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press: Red Clay Weather, Fata Morgana, Otherhood, Wrong, Angel, Interrupted, and Some Are Drowning. His work has been widely awarded and anthologized and has appeared in four editions of The Best American Poetry and two Pushcart Prize anthologies. Shepherd received many awards and honors over his career, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others.

Jericho Brown (Editor)
Jericho Brown is author of The Tradition, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition, won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

Read an Excerpt

A Muse​He winds through the party like wind, one of the just who live alone in black and white, bewildered by the eden of his body. (You, you talk like winter rain.) He's the meaning of almost-morning walking home at five A.M., the difference a night makes turning over into day, simple birds staking claims on no sleep. Whatever they call those particular birds. He's the age of sensibility at seventeen, he isn't worth the time of afternoon it takes to write this down. He's the friend that lightning makes, raking the naked tree, thunder that waits for weeks to arrive; he's the certainty of torrents in September, harvest time and powerlines down for miles. He doesn't even know his name. In his body he's one with air, white as a sky rinsed with rain. It's cold there, it's hard to breathe, and drowning is somewhere to be after a month of drought.

Table of Contents

Contents Introduction | Jericho Brown SOME ARE DROWNING The Difficult Music The New World Slaves Paradise The Lucky One Sappho’s Fragment Thirty-One Revised Two or Three Things I Know about Him Kindertotenlieder Two Boys Glimpsed in Late Light The First Farewell to Antinoüs Tantalus in May Sunday Until She Returns ANGEL, INTERRUPTED Depth of Field Narcissus at the Adonis Theater Two Versions of Midsummer My Brother the Rain A Man Named Troy He and Sleep Were Brothers The Gods at Three a.m. Jouissance Black Ice on Green Dolphin Street Drawing from Life Tornado Watch Same Cooke Would Be Sixty-One This Year A Plague for Kit Malone A Little Knowledge Narcissus and the Namesake River WRONG Antibody Deepest of the Great Lakes, Largest Too Surface Effects in Summer Wind Vampires Hermes, the Trickster Locale Who Owns the Night and Leases the Stars That Man Littler Sonnet Nights and Days of Nineteen-Something OTHERHOOD Reasons for Living Little Hands Periplus Burnt from the Notebooks Three Songs about Snow Les Semblables Hygiene Apollo on What the Boy Gave Apollo Steps in Daphne’s Footprints Semantics at Four p.m. Cygnus Weather Comes from the West Manifest Imaginary Elegy FATA MORGANA Orpheus Plays the Bronx How People Disappear For My Mother in Lieu of Mourning Pear Tree, Bartlett, Quotations At Weep Things Waiting to Be Dangerous Eve’s Awakening Objects in Mirror Are Closer than They Appear Self-Portrait in the New World Order A Handful of Sand With the Wind Blowing Through It Light Years RED CLAY WEATHER Attempted Bidcage Number Three To Be Free The New Life My Mother Was No White Dove What Nature Doesn't Show My Mother Dated Otis Redding Flying Falling Some Dreams He Forgot Play Dead Next Year in Gomorrah Kings Go Forth Seize the Day
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