Through poetry, we transform both the world of art and the world itself.
Bury My Clothes, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award for poetry, is a meditation on violence, race, and the place in art at which they intersect. Art specifically in oppressed communities is about survival, Roger Bonair-Agard asserts, and establishing personhood in a world that says you have none.
Roger Bonair-Agard is a Cave Canem fellow, two-time National Poetry Slam Champion, and author of Tarnish and Masquerade and Gully. He has appeared three times on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and is Co-founder and Artistic Director of the LouderARTS Project in New York.
“These poems offer up a speech textured with both the violence of racial construction and the complicated gorgeousness born out of survival and adaptation. These poems insist on the beauty of the darknesses we are bound by, and mean to help us live by reminding us: there is no crevice of grief or grace where something does not bloom.” — Aracelis Girmay, author of Teeth and Kingdom Animalia
