Indecency

Written by Justin Phillip Reed

Narrated by Justin Phillip Reed

Intricate, intimate, difficult, and confrontational poems that push at the boundaries of selfhood, skin, culture, sexuality, and blood.

Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring,
and insightful—the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781980090311

Reviews for Indecency

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This collection focuses on life as a gay black man in America. I found the second half to be more poignant than the first--but maybe I got used to his style? Reed uses space on the page and word positioning very effectively. I liked this collection, though there were some poems I did not understand.In the notes, he reveals more about his inspirations for specific poems, as well as other works referenced. I ended up re-reading several of these poems, as the info in the notes helped make more sense of them. In the acknowledgements he reveals that these poems were written while in the grip of depression, which I got from my reading, though I would have doubted my interpretation without his mentioning it.