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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
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      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
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      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
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      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
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  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
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    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
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      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022
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Book Review: Indecency by Justin Phillip Reed
 

Indecency
Justin Phillip Reed
Coffee House Press
2018
978-1-56689-514-9
70 pages
$16.95


Justin Phillip Reed is an American poet and essayist. He is the author of Indecency (Coffee House Press), winner of the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, winner of the 2019 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry, and a finalist for the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His second full-length collection of poetry, The Malevolent Volume, will be released in April 2020. He is the 2019-2021 Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and the recipient of a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. His work appears in African American Review, Best American Essays, Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, Obsidian, and elsewhere. He received his BA in creative writing at Tusculum College and his MFA in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis, where he served as Junior Writer-in-Residence. He has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Conversation Literary Festival, and the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis. Reed was born and raised in South Carolina.


Review





















A Review of Justin Phillip Reed's Indecency

Justin Phillip Reed sutures language, “smudged reflections, / [and] histories flattened” in Indecency, a collection of scathing testimonies that demonstrate what it means to be a Black, queer individual navigating through heteronormative, white constructs. Reed is unapologetic in his examinations of how the Black body is a subject of racial and sexual violence, forcing us to “carry the carnal weight” that devastates the marginalized time and time again.
 
In “Witness to the Woman I Am Not,” Reed gives voice to objectified women as an act of solidarity and unravels how they are engulfed in figurative and literal white spaces after introducing each passage with “(in which all this white is my gaze).” Following this recurring parenthetical is a series of black text blanketed in the whiteness of the page, almost swallowing “the labial-lingual demand of speech” to the point of erasure. The speaker deconstructs the woman further as the piece progresses, referring to her as “shorty” in the first passage, to “‘and she’” and “‘of her,’” to “‘snatched’ and ‘muffled’”—but, by the conclusion, the woman becomes a metonym: a “dress, a worried mess of splinters, somehow yet a dress.’”
 
Reed then leads us to a morgue, where we become a witness to “missing Black girls” swathed in a “body bag somewhere” in “Pushing up onto its elbows, the fable lifts itself into fact.” There is no room for discomfort as Reed depicts the devastating reality of the “disposability of Black girls who are prone to disappearance,” and how “Outrage, too, has a way of being disappeared.” We are left haunted by the ghosts of abducted Black women underneath these white sheets, waiting to mourn another Black girl to go missing only to repeat the cycle of them turning into a statistic.
 
Women are also othered and dehumanized by the patriarchal society they reside in, and Reed highlights this feminist lens before transitioning to the queer perspective in “Performing a Warped Masculinity en Route to the Metro,” “Take It Out of the Boy,” “Any Unkindness,” and “Exchange,” among others. These interconnected poems confront gender performativity, which is showcased through the speakers confessing that they are “tired / of pretending” to be a gay, closeted lover in “Take It Out of the Boy” and later admitting how “the mind threads the sting into memory” in “Exchange.”
 
The blurring between masculinity and femininity is seen through the speaker’s connection with the sister and mother as figures who invoke “a synonymy: to protect and to devour.” This dichotomous relationship of both safeguarding his femininity and becoming emasculated is an internal struggle the speaker attempts to fathom. The focus on the female body shifts when the speaker acknowledges the following:
what the young divorcé means to do with me
has nothing to do with me, our nights suggest…
 
we try extracting maximum
play from minimum utterance, grunting
and sleeping til one night i dream of being
the moon-necked wife annoyed at the mess of him,
 
so we quit fucking and the door to elsewhere
                                                                        opens me like a cut.

The pressure of society coerces the speaker’s lover to deny his sexuality; and, as a result, the speaker’s own self-worth and acceptance of their own identity is diminished. The speaker becomes a subject of shame caught in the web of gendered and sexual politics.
 
Reed stitches tension, resentment, and grief in “The Fratricide”—a harrowing account of how Black bodies are conglomerate, a startling contrast to how easily identifiable white people are. The poem is damning in its opening lines: “I was coerced into my brother’s murder. Because / I loved him I was made to live for him. Inside him. / As him.” The repetition at the end of the poem creates an uneasy cadence as the speaker cries out:

Are we brothers. Aren’t we our brother.
No, but anyway, thanks. We should cut our hair.
How can you tell us apart. We should cut our hair.
How can we tell ourselves apart for you. How can
we help you to tell us apart… How can we help you to tear
us apart. How can we help you. You tear us apart.

This commentary on how Black people are indistinguishable from each other, in life or in death, is layered with suppression, residual anger, and a call for action. The brutalities committed against the Black community are something we continue to witness daily, but Reed refuses to be desensitized by the countless names that have been forged into history because of racially charged violence. “The Fratricide” is a block of text framed around a bolded message: “how can you still not look at his face.” To Reed, it is impossible to ignore these injustices; to turn our backs on these lived realities is inexcusable.
 
Indecency is a stunning collection lined with unsettling truths as well as fragments of blood and bone. Reed’s craft is undeniable, but one must explicate his poetry like a mortician to fully experience its visceral nature—one must have the ability to uncover the dead without fear. As Reed laments in “About a White City”: “They say there are those / who have never / felt terror.” Indecency is a book that demands to be read on its own terms, and the obscene snapshots Reed strings together will leave you feeling haunted.


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Patricia Damocles is the Managing Editor for Jet Fuel Review who is majoring in English Language & Literature with a minor in Creative Writing. She is also a member of Sigma Tau Delta’s Rho Lambda chapter and a Wolny Writing Residency fellow. What she strives to achieve as a JFR editor is to give passionate, aspiring writers a platform to express themselves. As someone who has had the opportunity to be published in a previous issue, she is aware of how empowering it is to have her voice acknowledged in the world of literature. In her free time, she enjoys reading poetry and short stories, and making memories with her friends, family, and cats.

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  • Home
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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
      • Amy Nelder Fall 2022
      • Bette Ridgeway Fall 2022
      • Ursula Sokolowska Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
      • William Stobb Fall 2022
      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
      • Lisa Ampleman Fall 2022
      • Will Cordeiro Fall 2022
      • Jesica Davis Fall 2022
      • Peter O'Donovan Fall 2022
      • Mackenzie Carignan Fall 2022
      • Jason Fraley Fall 2022
      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
      • Chad Weeden Fall 2022
      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
      • Liz Robbins Fall 2022
      • john compton Fall 2022
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
      • W. J. Lofton Fall 2022
      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
      • Kimberly Ann Priest Fall 2022
      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
      • Konstantin Kulakov Fall 2022
      • Nellie Cox Fall 2022
      • Jennifer Martelli Fall 2022
      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
      • Hannah Harlow Fall 2022
      • Natalia Nebel Fall 2022
      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022