Paper Pistol

Following in the footsteps of poets like Hanif Abdurraqib, John Murillo, and Robert Hayden, Raphael Jenkins’s Paper Pistol considers tenderness, heteronormativity, male friendship, grief, and the various violences implemented by and against Black men. Channeling a multitude of speakers, this collection explores Black fatherhood and “the totems we bequeath” to our young, whom the “hunter . . . see[s as] a field of bucks instead of a / field of boys....