SLINGSHOT begins with the author ensconced in the menacing isolation of the pastoral, but once the work migrates to the City, monstrum grows form and fangs. In these messy, horny, desperate poems spun from dream logic, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson considers the consequences of black sexual and gender deviance, as well as the emotional burden of being forced to the rim of society, then punished for what keeps you alive. -- from Amazon.

"With beguiling shade and a sensuous portrait of bottom epistemology, Malcolm Tariq's 'Heed the Hollow' delivers upon us bittersweet experiences of black queer life in the South. Each poem builds upon the next, inscribing on the mind's eye the interiority of lives at once familiar and strange, their lyricism leaping from the poet's pen to the page to prick the ear of the reader's sinless soul. I cannot unhear these poems. Their whispers shout in the...