Cover Art: Ebony G. Patterson
Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Paperback, 36 pages
Sept 10 2016, ISBN 978-1-936919-40-6
About Justin Phillip Reed
Justin Phillip Reed is a South Carolina native and the author of A History of Flamboyance (YesYes Books, 2016). His first full-length book of poetry, Indecency, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2018. His work appears—or soon will—in Best American Essays, Callaloo, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Obsidian, PEN American, Vinyl, and elsewhere. He received his MFA at Washington University in St. Louis.
A History of Flamboyance by Justin Phillip Reed
About A History of Flamboyance
A History of Flamboyance is a creation myth. It’s a history insofar as its speakers, submerged in traumas and appetites and ecstasies, cast around in search of precedents and raisons d’etre, and find mostly shreds of legends and a ramshackle faith. A Black queer self contends with the unmapped wilderness of its existence and plots a course through various intimacies equally dangerous and illuminating. Here, flamboyance is not a performance as much as it is an affect of precarity—of feeling combustible, volatile, always on the verge of blazing out or collapsing in wisps. These speakers—the quiet son, the choirboy, the lover, the cutter—are all faces of the same exile.
