“…these poems elide the ego and present the self either as a lexical robot (superego) or magnetic meat, the ignoble body of the id. Kearney's prosody is miraculous. Explosive double beats launch the lines or hit the break like a hi-hat. Slant rhymes suggest infinite puns, but Kearney sometimes downshifts from complexity and just cruises around the neighborhood. Formalism as syncopation and signification: I can't think of another writer as gifted as Kearney is at sound.” — Ken Chen for NPR

Recorded live in Portland, OR on August 9, 2019, Fodder splinters the sounds you were looking at on paper into the document you can hear through speakers. &/or vice versa. Drawing in part from the award winning poetry collection Buck Studies‘ “Loud-Assed Colored Silence” series, Douglas Kearney (words) and Val Jeanty (sounds) interweave new and old texts of original composition, samples, and improvisation to create live sound chemistry, raw energy, and better listening through playing. Pull up.

“Lurking below the pure alchemy in Kearney’s Buck Studies is a language that constantly flirts with collapse. The combination of an out-of-joint lyric with a mille-feuille of text reveals the transformative subject of the black body quelled, contained, caricatured, and dismembered. Absurdity marries intellect here while a frenetic melancholy embraces the ceaseless nature of historical despair. And yet, we still encounter humor, perverse and sprung from chaos. Buck Studies is a peek behind the curtain of a brilliant mind resigned to the fact that “the torments must go on mustn’t they for the tremble tremble tremble…” if nothing else.”

— Ruth Ellen Kocher

"Kearney's collection of opera libretti explodes with verbal inge-nuity, graphically lunging out at us like Marvel Comics sound effects meets Italo-Futurist cut-up. Stuck in a domestic cell or a tenement, his characters bust out in song that riddles and rages and confounds. Kearney is our generation's lyric and sonic pugilist."

— Cathy Park Hong

“This book is a ‘Mess.’ It’s a theory of Black cultural production that does its work by refusing to be straight(ened) up. It’s Doug doing his do(o). Dig it. Like a mess of greens, this Mess is gritty to start with, but you know it’s going to be goooood. Dig in. It won’t read itself—but it might read you.”

— Evie Shockley

“Because bodies matter, name, beget and conceive, Douglas Kearney’s Patter exists within the stall, the break, the miscarriage in bodies bothered by history, blood and breath. What is it to father the inchoate and the ineffable that exists in the life of the black family? Kearney’s exquisite poems dissolve our sight, force us to speak aloud, and compel us to hunt and find within the illogic logic of our lives. Patter is its own genius music—revolutionary, intimate and everyone’s.”

— Claudia Rankine

“Douglas Kearney’s innovative new collection makes me tremble like a ‘mouth and mind full of fish hooks.’ These poems literally vibrate with Kearney’s precocious intellect and passion. They hum, they bang, they bite. What else can I say? I have never encountered poetry like this before.”

— Terrance Hayes

From Harry Belafonte's "Jump in the Line" to Eric Clapton's "Tears in Heaven," Douglas Kearney's poems in Starts Spinning will have you saying yes YES. Short, personal takes on pop hits, filled with humor and pathos.