I'm Always so Serious

Karisma Price's stunning debut collection is an extended
meditation on Blackness, on family, on loss. Anchored in New Orleans and New
York City, these poems braid personal and public histories into a cultural
reckoning of past and present. James Booker speaks to Ringo Starr, a phone "Autocorrects
'Nigga' to Nights, '" If Beale Street
Could Talk is recast with characters from The Odyssey. In these pages there is grief, there is absence, there
is violence--"We
know that mostly everything around us / is measured in blood."--but there is
also immense love and truth. Karisma Price has created a serious masterpiece, a
book "so dark you have no other option but to call it / precious."