When Did We Stop Being Cute?
Available from CavanKerry Press.
This book is my first full-length collection, and is a “novel in poetic form,” meaning that while each poem stands alone, together they tell a story about growing up a mixed-race kid in the Jersey suburbs in the 80’s. The titles of the poems are all taken from the music I listened to then (the good, the bad, and the so-bad-they’re-good), and it reflects on what it was to try to “become a man” in a world that saw Black men as a threat. The collection’s title is a question the narrator keeps asking, wanting to know when he went from an “adorable chocolate boy” to a “scary dark man. It features a foreword from my homie Nico Amador that is worth the price all on its own (seriously, it might be the best part of the book). It is currently available for pre-orders and will be in bookstores (such as The Spiral Bookcase) starting in April.
To explore the music referenced in this collection, check out this Spotify playlist.
Just/More
Available from Finishing Line Press
My first collection, this chapbook examines fatherhood in the age of Black Lives Matter, police violence, and post-Obama America. It emerged from the questions my kids would ask as they saw George Floyd die and the rallies and movement that arose in his wake. These poems flew out from me, and it still feels a little bit of a blur that they ever saw the light of day in book form.
It asks the question: how do we raise children that hope, that dream, that remain innocent and beautiful when “mixed skin/is a pre- existing condition?”
Yolanda Wisher, author of Monk Eats an Afro and 3rd Poet Laurette of Philadelphia, says “if ‘every word is a war’ on the news, the poems are daisies in the guns pointed at us daily. Like a cousin to Baraka’s suicidal preface in 1961, this long song meditates on how children fill the gaps in our broken hearts and light the way to our backstories.”
Jeff Conant, himself a father and author of A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency, writes that “if you hear Etheridge Knight, Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes singing through this
tender howl of rage, it’s because in 21st Century America Martin Wiley, the poet and paterfamilias, just wants to goof around with his kids, but there’s a brutal war on Black bodies outside his door so he has to wake up in the heavy morning not wanting ‘to know/how we died last night.’”