supreme night

Inventive—a tongue free of fear, a language of Black alternativism and folk music. A heaven built brick by brick, reclamation by reclamation. Damn. I’m surrounded here in supreme night, first by myth then by rhythm. Donnell writes, “A sermon, a subverter, no anomaly/ All that rumble young man, rumble.” And ain’t it like a poet to use a collective fist towards rapture. These poems swing back, swing first. There is a place for us here in these poems. A salve for the burdened. A night worth wading.
-Daniel B. Summerhill, Author of Divine, Divine, Divine & Mausoleum of Flowers

Keith Donnell Jr. has succeeded in producing a genius poetic epic of linked and yet independent poems that explore fugitivity and liberation in a sustained indictment of the State. supreme night interweaves history and condemnation of contemporary state-sanctioned violence through a maneuver of collapsing time and place. What has happened continues to happen and has an impact on the future dreamings that germinate in this moment. He has a way of holding attention to multiple time periods while engaging in assured use of poetic formal experimentation, including the creation of his own forms. The book incorporates such rich voices and music that it could easily serve as libretto, inviting theatre or operatic production to reveal through performance the clearly evident layeredness of the poems. On the page, he’s just nice with it: the language, the history, in indictments of state-sanctioned violence particularly against young people, the invocation of multiple voices, the allusions to Black musical and spiritual traditions.  He’s just nice with it. If you have your Black card, your head might automatically nod in appreciation and affirmation. If you have never been invited to the Cookout and might not ever be, you still will find instruction on how to best discover all the meat and gristle on the bone. Buy the book and get down to studying these moves; you might interrogate your own history; you might just be changed for the better.
–Raina J. León, author of black god mother this body

This book sounds off like a trumpet call. Communing with Black spirits and ancestors, from God to old hymns of Black freedom, to love — it is a book of psalms. Keith’s poetry carries the water to our ancestors, to our violent histories and current conditions. Traveling time and place these poems show us the entrails and imprints left on our bodies and how we must prevail by asking us to bear witness to our Black cosmologies of heroes & heroines, memories and lives.
–Cara Page, co-author of Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care & Safety