BOOKS
"Ryan Black is an exquisite craftsman whose material, I think, is time. The sounds it makes: of a speaker losing and accumulating breath in his attempts to record a personal and familial history of Queens, New York. That record is fleeting, fugitive, shaped by, and interested in, white, racialized (and thus violatory) conditions. These elegiac, capacious poems carry conflicting assertions. They are poems of reckoning and ‘awful silence.’ What species of fire can such friction create?"
Aracelis Girmay
"Ryan Black has written poems of enormous urgency for our time: at once a blistering critique of racism and xenophobia in America, and an equally blistering critique of the high- and middle-brow condescensions that sequester us all in cultural spheres that might as well be holding cells. . . . In a dark time, mindfulness and generous connection are the only possible recourse. Death of a Nativist gives me heart."
Linda Gregerson