Stop and Frisk: American Poems

by Asim Jabari

Overview

"Urgency and imagination, truth and focus: Jabari Asim brings those qualities together in a book of poetry that confronts the lethal face of racism: death-by-police. This book challenges the boundaries of the art by being, in a very good sense of the word, documentary."

-Robert Pinsky

In Stop and Frisk, Jabari Asim ruthlessly interrogates entrenched injustice and its insidious echoes. Part rap sheet, part concept album, Asim lays down tracks that add conviction to our collective broken record: What could be more American than pretending truths were self-evident when they seldom were? Drawing defiant inspiration from the news and the Blues, these poems arrest our attention and burn grooves into us. These starkly revelatory poems expose the dark heart of our nation and call for a reckoning-the only way out before everything breaks / into hurt, noise, and ever after.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780999823941
Publisher:	Bloomsday Ghostwriting
Publication date:	06/26/2020
Pages:	90
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.22(d)

About the Author

Jabari Asim is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts and the author of seven books for adults-including We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival-and ten books for children. His poems are included in several anthologies, including Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present; Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the 21st Century; and Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art. After more than a decade at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The Washington Post, he now directs the MFA program at Emerson College.

Table of Contents

1

Young Americans 15

So You Think You Can Dance? 17

The Talk 19

Pinch Me 20

Vanishing Point 22

2

Cancer Sold Separately 27

The Disappeared 29

Because I’m Happy 30

Loosies 31

3

Warning: Contains Graphic Violence 35

Menace To Society 36

Where The Party At 37

Don’t Start None 41

A House Is Not 43

Wild Things 44

4

Check The Manual 47

False Confession 49

Found Poem #1 51

Urban Dictionary 53

Found Poem #2 54

One Thousand Chokeholds From Now 55

Furtive Movements 56

Barney Fife Gets Totally Lost 57

Found Poem #3 58

We Have Investigated Ourselves And Found Nothing Wrong 59

5

We Steal Weaves 63

Memorials, Jersey City 64

Action Figure 65

6

Affluenza, or Judge Jean Boyd Earns Her Silver Gavel 69

The Kind That Scares You 71

Thug Life 72

7

CNN Sends A Man To Ferguson 77

Walking While Black 79

Reckoning 82

Notes 85

Editorial Reviews

“Urgency and imagination, truth and focus: Jabari Asim brings those qualities together in a book of poetry that confronts the lethal face of racism: death-by-police. This book challenges the boundaries of the art by being, in a very good sense of the word, documentary.”—Robert Pinsky

From the Publisher