Book cover of PlayHouse: Poems

Book description

Poems on Black joy, masculinity, and the music that transforms a space into a home

Jorrell Watkins's debut poetry collection is a polyvocal, musically charged disruption of the United States's fixation on drug and gun culture. The poems in Play|House embody many identities, including son, brother, fugitive, bluesman, karate practitioner,…

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Why read it?

1 author picked PlayHouse as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Noting my fortune to have been a reader of this book before its official surfacing to the national public, I was first drawn to those poems that again gave me back my memory. Poems reminisced on Migos, Blu & Exile, and others.

Soon after, it's display of self-portraiture unfolded into a mastery of wit, celebrating how music is always a task of discovery first.

“I saw stranger; looked again, I saw friend,” Watkins writes with an intelligence marked by the fruit of reorientation and heart that comes with inhabiting and celebrating your own tribe.

If you love PlayHouse...

Book cover of These Blue Mountains

These Blue Mountains by Sarah Loudin Thomas,

A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.

German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…

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