EVIE SHOCKLEY, (Jersey City, NJ) poet and scholar, is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English at Rutgers University. A Lannan Literary Award-winner, she is the author of multiple books of poetry including a half-red sea; the new black, which received the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry; and semiautomatic, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2018.

"suddenly we sings the nuanced realities of Black life as homage, elegy, and polyphonic celebration striking at the core of remembrance. A deep and unfettered thinking, Shockley gives us shouts of joy amidst the drudge of a world unraveled."--Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite

"This verbally and visually stirring outing from Shockley (Semiautomatic) offers a rewarding mix of short and long poems, elegies and odes, images, repetitions, and 'conversation' with writers and artists Shockley's poems are risk-taking and significant"--Publishers Weekly

"...an astonishing variety of poetic styles... and across all of it there's a sense of play and innovation..."--Brittney Edmonds, New Books Network

"Evie Shockley's work is imbued with a particular kind of tenderness, for the world and for the self in the world. It's a savvy tenderness wedded to a type of vigilance that continually tracks the lines of the political and the personal, documenting where they meet and where they later separate again..."--Poetry Society of America

"There is so much movement but also transformation. A blossoming, a birthing, a blooming that is really intriguing."--Dean Rader, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Shockley's homophones and verbal play shred the sentence into its most basic units. The result is as charming and fun as it is political. Her book probes inheritance: what we inherit from history and from language."--Diana Mehta, Electric Lit