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. 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.’”
AN UNKINDNESS FRAGMENTS MEANING SERIES
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. 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. Justin Phillip Reed sutures language, “smudged reflections, / 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 was born and raised in South Carolina.Ī Review of Justin Phillip Reed's Indecency He has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Conversation Literary Festival, and the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis, where he served as Junior Writer-in-Residence. He received his BA in creative writing at Tusculum College and his MFA in poetry at Washington University in St. His work appears in African American Review, Best American Essays, Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, Obsidian, and elsewhere. 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 second full-length collection of poetry, The Malevolent Volume, will be released in April 2020. 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. Justin Phillip Reed is an American poet and essayist.
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