Douglas Kearney

Kearney's Buck Studies refashions and expands the methods and aims of his earlier work, his talents for collage and performative disruption and vision regarding the black male experience is sorely needed in a post-Trayvon world that mainstreams white supremacy. This is a mature and realized collection that is confrontational but musical, somber and ecstatic by turns and some of the best output yet from Kearney.

Kearney's poetry collection breaks out of form with song, humor, and unflincihing interrogation. While referencing dead, white Modernists like Elliot and Pound, he overturns paradigms and works ravenously and disjointedly experiments with font, space, and form (or formlessness) in order to articulate the his emotional and intellectual insights on black experience.. A fearless and innovative poetics investigating black consciousness.

In this collection Kearney is largely looking at the African-American experience from the inside. Some may not be specific to African-Americans--the poems reflect American experience--but it all fits together.

Most of these I did not really get. References to movies and TV, music, the usual of poets referencing other poets. He uses a lot of word play, so understanding can be complicated. You have to get the references to know what he is talking about, let alone how it fits.

My favorite is show more "Eulogy for a Pair of Kicks", which is funny and clever, and I understood. I suspect most of these poems are this clever if you catch his references. Here we have wordplay on different types of shoes, different parts of shoes, uses of shoes, advertising of different brands. "It's gotta be the—!" show less

"Buck Studies" is "a potent cocktail of political anger and radical formal experimentation.”

Review available at the New York Journal of Books:

http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/buck-studies