Stereo(TYPE)

Description

The award-winning poet's darkly riotous poetry debut, exploring stereotypes of Black male identity and sexuality in a corrupt system Lyrical, loud and radically urgent, Jonah Mixon-Webster's debut aims its sights at the words and images that shape us and the corrupt forces that stand in the way of our freedom. Stereo(TYPE) is a reckoning and a force. It is a revision of our most sacred mythologies - and a work of documentary poetry reporting from Mixon-Webster's hometown of Flint, Michigan, where untainted tap water is still not guaranteed and the legacies of racist policies persist. Challenging stereotypes through scenes scattered with satire, violence, and the extreme vagaries of everyday life, Mixon-Webster explores the places where space and body, race and region and sexuality and class meet and intersect. He invents visual/sonic forms, recasts poems as FAQs and transcripts, and dives into dreamscapes and modern tragedies. Interrogating language and the ways we wield it as both sword and shield, Stereo(TYPE) is a rapturous collection of vital and beautiful poems.

Jonah Mixon-Webster is a poet and conceptual/sound artist from Flint, Michigan. His debut collection, Stereo(TYPE), has been a finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the winner of the 2019 PEN America/Joyce Osterweil Award and the 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize. He is an alumnus of Eastern Michigan University and Illinois State University, and in addition to having served as a PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow in 2019-2020 has received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, The Conversation Literary Festival and ivoh.

A master of experimentation . . . This work is alive