Reprise: Poems and Photographs

by Golden

Overview

A visual & lyrical declaration filled with fever & flight, REPRISE, Golden's second collection of poetry & photography maps a personal search for safety in a U.S. that offers none.

Golden’s collection illuminates a path through national uprisings, anti-trans violence, family loss, and a global pandemic. These sonically playful poems and assertive, color-saturated portraits reveal a stark vulnerability that invites readers to look deeply at times of great and, possibly, liberatory uncertainty.

At its heart, this collection asks: Where is home? Who is free? What makes a nation?

Golden seeks portals towards self-liberation. In their pursuit, we’re invited to witness and learn from their interior revolution, from which they emerge more free to declare themselves in small and large ways: Whether stating I just want to wear my orange dress to the tennis courts & come back home unbothered or I am home in the arms of the armed. 

Building on their debut collection, A Dead Name That Learned How to Live and their award-winning self-portraiture series, On Learning How to Live, Golden honors the living siege & sorrow, rage & revival, joy & creation of being Black and trans in America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798888903056
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	03/25/2025
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Golden (they/them) is a Black, gender-nonconforming, trans photographer, poet, educator, curator, and community organizer raised in Hampton, Virginia (Kikotan land), and currently residing in Brooklyn, New York (Lenapehoking land). Golden is the author of A DEAD NAME THAT LEARNED HOW TO LIVE (Game Over Books, 2022), a Lambda Literary Award finalist in 2023, and the photographic series On Learning How to Live, a 2021 Arnold Newman Photography Prize finalist. On Learning How to Live documents Black trans life at the intersections of surviving and living in the United States. Golden holds a BFA in photography and imaging from New York University.

Editorial Reviews

Reprise, as the title may suggest, is a miraculous and immense book of returns and reinventions. The beauty of Golden's work is the close attention paid to ideas, to objects, to people and place, a close attention that makes the poems as limitless as the subjects. This book is an act of rage, of affection, of innovation. An achievement.”
—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year

“Golden has given us a burning frame that resists any easy gaze at Black skin, Black memory, or Black voice. Golden announces, ‘I will die… so let this be...without the language of glory.’ Reprise is defiant, sublime, incandescent. Reprise is about chosen birth. The language of limb, nigga, and stanza is so original, so unforgettably revelatory, that I'm certain we will keep returning to the face of these poems and images to see ourselves revealed and confronted here.”
—Rachel Eliza Griffiths, author of Promise

“Reprise is an unflinching work that fills us with commentary on a replay of history, past and present, and allows us to imagine a future of possibilities. I admire Golden’s experimentation with language, storytelling and imaging-making.”
—Deborah Willis, author of Posing Beauty in African American Culture

From the Publisher