Poetry. African American Studies. Asian American Studies. LGBT Studies. Winner of the Publishing Triangle's 2010 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the 13th Annual Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. "I applaud Ronaldo Wilson's pathbreaking movement into what has never, never, in history, been said. About sexuality, in particular, these poems speak with incorrigible and raving clarity. And, always, they display intellectual curiosity, and an impatient, gorgeous readiness to make language new."—Wayne Koestenbaum "[A] warning to anyone tempted to believe that in objectification lies freedom. Livid inside an apocalyptic negative capability, these poems are constructed through their maker's deconstruction, and reading, I too, felt unmade."—Claudia Keelan "Ronaldo Wilson's POEMS OF THE BLACK OBJECT turns the parenthetical inside out, contents kicking and alive, person, race and being: where fate is in store in you, not for you, out there; in consciousness, and barely conscious, where consciousness is the accumulation of the scarcely discernible experiences. Wilson's poems captures states of person, the thinking being, the being thinking, the being perceived, and all the slippage between stages of person, Black and on the page, folding and unfolding layers of social construction."—Erica Hunt "The force here is in the erotic attachment between the human figures certainly—but also (and more surprisingly) between history and present-day experience. Ronaldo Wilson teases the reader with earnestness while he refracts event and experience. The effect is dazzling. The poems are panoramic. One part slave narrative, one part pillow book, POEMS OF THE BLACK OBJECT is a triumph of the social lyric: violent, tender, absurd."—G.E Patterson "For all the disturbances examined in this intensely lucid book of bodily desire, dead porn stars, and the high art of human survival, the voice of these poems manages to maintain a kind of giddy composure. Perhaps the trick of it comes through his sense that, 'pattern organizes trauma, and so does speed.' It's not so fast, the pace here; we're made to look, to see, with shrewd intention. It's that Ronaldo Wilson's writing doesn't let you get too comfortable. It shifts experience and reckoning from poem to essay, theory to epistle, these intuitive modes of a person in search of a particular poetics, darting around sharp visions that could bloody or shine on the tempestuous landscape 'the black object' emerges from."—Tisa Bryant

Poems of the Black Object

Literature & Fiction

Wilson, Ronaldo V.

Poetry

Futurepoem Books

Poetry. African &amp; African American Studies. Asian &amp; Asian American Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Performance Studies. "Ronaldo V. Wilson explodes all over the mouth of whiteness in LUCY 72 like Césaire stroking the Latin root 'niger,' courting its deranged figuration. With satire, grace, deep lyric reflection--all inside of the persistent strangulation of a rigorous couplet--the radiant poems in LUCY 72 are a working out and a working on this thing we call 'race.' In these poems, whiteness is abstracted away from color and made manifest in gesture, a relaxed state, a non-awareness, and certain preferences and unperceived privileges. Wilson strips down the symbolic figure, Lucy, exposing her blind and deaf obsession with her own whiteness--'One of my favorite words is alabaster'--and cranks our eyes toward these brutal cultural tropes: there is 'a black' and then there is the effortless abstraction of whiteness; blackness is opaque; whiteness is transparent; blackness, hard object, whiteness, effervescence. LUCY 72 is a haunting, gorgeously written, and absolutely necessary book for our times. When Lucy speaks, we should all listen closely."--Dawn Lundy Martin "LUCY 72 is an intricate, multi-faceted, rarely used underhand serve executed with the power and skill of a masterful languager. Wilson undertakes and asserts a new kind of self-reflexive portraiture in which all manner of 'body' is addressed. The body historical, the racial body, the flesh body, all gather in an open-air refusal to conform, to resign. Here agency is fiercely nuanced--petaled and thorned...the gloves have come off. Raise your racquet. Loose your head and heart. These poems are a guidebook of rosary beads for crossing the street, returning an out wide serve, and for being transcendently human."--giovanni singleton

Lucy 72

Lucy

1913 Press

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. FARTHER TRAVELER by Ronaldo Wilson is an expansive, complex hybrid of poetry, prose, and memoir that engages with contemporary culture, race and sexuality.

Farther Traveler

History & Criticism

Counterpath Press

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Books by Wilson, Ronaldo V.