Dispatch: Poems

by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Overview

Winner of the 2018 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, Cameron Awkward-Rich’s intimate second book of poems attempts to reckon with and withstand American violence.

Set against the media environment that saturates even our most intimate spaces, Dispatch attends to, revises, and thinks adjacent to the news of racial/gendered violence in the US, from the nineteenth century to the present day. These poems ask: What kind of revisions will make this a world/a story that is concerned with my people’s flourishing? How ought I pay attention, how to register perpetual bad news without letting it fatally intrude? Cameron Awkward-Rich is among the most bracing voices to emerge in recent years, a dazzling exemplar of poetry’s (and humanity’s) possibilities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780892555031
Publisher:	Persea
Publication date:	12/10/2019
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and Dispatch  (Persea Books, 2019). His creative work has been supported by fellowships from Cave Canem, The Watering Hole, and the Lannan Foundation. Also a scholar of trans theory and expressive culture in the U.S., Cameron earned his PhD from Stanford University's program in Modern Thought & Literature. His more critical writing can be found in Signs, Trans Studies Quarterly, American Quarterly and elsewhere, and has been supported by fellowships from Duke University's Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the ACLS. His book The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment was published by Duke University Press in Fall 2022. Presently, he is an associate professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Editorial Reviews

"... Awkward-Rich’s terse yet beguiling lyric articulates what it is to inhabit a particular body at a particular time in history, and, in the shadow of violence, to seek—or resist—openness."

The New Yorker

"Awkward-Rich seeks his own differentiation, recognition, the perhaps impossible goal of feeling truly seen for your whole self. "

Los Angeles Review of Books - Stephanie Burt

"Awkward-Rich also grounds and interrogates corporal experience through a variety of poetic forms… [he] imagines building a world inside your body full of the people you love that have been taken from you, the beauty that you can find there."

Columbia Journal

"The poems in Awkward-Rich’s second collection speak with poised urgency out of profound, enduring fear imposed by impossibly huge forces… and steady themselves, when steadiness seems possible, on the fact of an undiminishable self beyond language. "

American Poets

"... Awkward-Rich’s terse yet beguiling lyric articulates what it is to inhabit a particular body at a particular time in history, and, in the shadow of violence, to seek—or resist—openness."

The New Yorker