Randall Horton's past honors include the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and most recently a GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction for Hook: A Memoir. The author of numerous books, he is a member of the experimental performance group Heroes Are Gang Leaders, which received the 2018 American Book Award in Oral Literature. He is associate professor of English at the University of New Haven and lives in Bloomfield, New Jersey.

"In [#289-128] Randall Horton serves a cicerone to life behind the walls, guiding us with clear eyes through the cell and the yard, through the mess hall and tiers. He also proves himself a sage, revealing knowing truths about the humans we feed into a carnivorous American carceral system: their doubts and hopes, their wounds, their searches for healing. And if that wasn't enough, his collection is also a moving personal reckoning. Horton is indeed a necessary voice in these troubled times." -- Mitchell Jackson, author of the Survival Math

"Take a thing or two that you're not and that you want not to be. Add salt in a wound and make that thing or two the only things the world sees. Make that not-what-you-are your mirror. Play it out over a century or three and you'll understand something about this tradition. It's not the classical route to wisdom (or is it?). Randall Horton's poems testify to 'a box reluctant / not to be a box, ' testify that reckoning with the terms of imprisonment is the key to whatever can be unlocked. He focuses on what happens to life, to time, to flesh and spirit, when 'the [I] in me no longer lives' and 'the collective (we) / is no better.' These poems refuse to testify to the façade. Instead, scripted 'not with breath / but breath's imagination, ' through them we can learn that whatever lives can be made here will entail all 'the bad & terrible beauty just beneath the living.' " -- Ed Pavlic

"The poems are gritty, precise, staccato slaps, evocative and rich....Horton's poetry is the prism and guide for we what need now, so tomorrow can look like something else. Ideally something better and more empathic. Will his poetry change your life? Of course it will." -- This Book Will Change Your Life

"A book that is deeply empathy-inducing through stylish poems that are effective, heartbreaking, and haunting." -- Vol. 1 Brooklyn

"A unique and inherently fascinating body of work...A collection of poetry that will linger in the mind and memory long after the book itself has been finished and set back upon the shelf." -- Midwest Book Review

"Every poem points toward that future (impossible as much as possible) and away from the present where 'skin color / is a race that never stops running.' In this collection of poems, Horton neither lags behind nor pretends to be ahead of the game. He stays abreast, zigzags, ducks, and scampers alongside, filing reports from a margin, a liminal strip irreducible to an outside (curious tourist) or an inside (embedded correspondent)." -- Chicago Review

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Pub date: 2020-09-08

Length: 104 pages