Description
Graywolf Press, 2019
Winner of the 2018 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Heed the Hollow by Malcolm Tariq announces the significance of “the bottom” in American letters with tenderness and grotesque rigor. Yes, the bottom as position in the hierarchies of power, and also, more notably, as receptive sexual partner. Blackness and sexuality, the American South, and softness all get re-inscribed in the scars of flesh, the history of bodies and lands. These poems are erotic in a heightened sense: an intensity of a supremely overwhelming magnitude. A maximalist in that how can anybody ever hold at the same time the weight of a person and the weight of his histories pressed upon one body? These poems aren’t solely collisions of pure desires though, but of control, deep insight, risk, and radical love. They are obsessed with narrative, with the unmarked grave, acquisition, performance, memory, and the body’s unfathomable abilities to hold, to grasp. Tariq is of a sexy, tremendous, and truly original sort of intellect. This debut collection makes physical the beauty of human spirit—a true testament to the bottom’s many power(s).
––Jeric Smith
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