The recipient of a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize brings us a radical, urgent collection of poems about Blackness, the self, and the dismantling of corrupt powers in the fight for freedom.
At the intersections of space and the body, race and region, sexuality and class, comes the poetry of Jonah Mixon-Webster. Stereo(TYPE) is a reckoning and a force, a revision of our most sacred mythologies, and a work of documentary poetry reporting from Mixon-Webster's hometown of Flint, Michigan, where clean tap water remains an uncertainty and the aftermath of racist policies persist.
Challenging stereotypes through scenes that scatter with satire, violence, and the extreme vagaries of everyday life, Mixon-Webster invents visual/sonic forms, conceptualizes poems as FAQs and transcripts, dives into dreamscapes and modern tragedies, deconstructing the very foundations America is built on. Interrogating language and the ways we wield it as both sword and shield, Stereo (TYPE) is a one-of-a-kind, rapturous collection of vital and beautiful poems. JONAH MIXON-WEBSTER is a poet-educator, scholar, and conceptual/sound artist from Flint, Michigan. Stereo(TYPE), his debut poetry collection, received the 2017 Sawtooth Poetry Prize from Ahsahta Press, the 2019 PEN America/Joyce Osterweil Award, and was a finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. He is an alumnus of Eastern Michigan University and Illinois State University. His poetry and hybrid works have been featured in various publications including Callaloo, Pennsound, Best New Poets 2017, and Best American Experimental Writing 2018.