Imperial Liquor: Poems

Imperial Liquor is a chronicle of melancholy, a reaction to the monotony of racism. These poems concern loneliness, fear, fatigue, rage, and love; they hold fatherhood held against the vulnerability of the black male body, aging, and urban decay. Part remembrance, part swan song for the Compton, California of the 1980s, Johnson examines the limitations of romance to heal broken relationships or rebuild a broken city. Slow Jams, red-lit rooms, cheap liquor, like seduction and betrayal--what's more American? This book tracks echoes, rides the residue of music "after the love is gone." 
Smokey 
 the most dangerous men 
 in my neighborhood 
 only listened to love songs 
 to reach those notes 
 a musicologist told me 
 a man essentially cuts 
 his own throat. some nights 
 even now, i'll hear a falsetto 
 and think i should run

Author: Amaud Johnson
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: 02/25/2020
Pages: 70
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.80w x 0.30d
ISBN: 9780822966067
About the Author
A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, Amaud Jamaul Johnson is a winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Dorset Prize, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the MacDowell Colony, and Cave Canem. Born and raised in Compton, California, he is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing.