I'm Always so Serious

Karisma Prices 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 violenceWe 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.