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what it do

Collections

Indecency
Coffee House Press, May 2018
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Reviews

"Reed’s visceral and teasingly cerebral debut probes black identity, sexuality, and violence and is inseparably personal and political. He displays a searing sense of injustice about dehumanizing systems, and his speakers evoke the quotidian with formidable eloquence."
— Publishers Weekly

"Reed’s corporate entity, then, is an infernal creation—embodied but having no particular body, and therefore no locus of humanity, since whatever else we are, we are our bodies first and finally."
— Justin Taylor, for Assignment Mag

A History of Flamboyance
YesYes Books, 2016

"If these poems are confessions, then Reed's many formal interventions mean to break up, down or apart, reveal and revise, perhaps, the performance of those confessions, an effort to expose their inner makings, motives, our histories, these 'constructed rituals' of shame and desire. I'd say this fits a mind that seems at turns insatiable, wanting more of our world and of the poem; at other times more reserved, wanting less; but at all times is a mind nevertheless committed to the poem's queerest possibility, evoking its many traditions just as it disrupts or rewrites them. So these poems teach me. Justin Phillip Reed is a productive new voice in contemporary poetry, 'rose up like a hard new fact,' and one that feels in every way as irrefutable."
— Rickey Laurentiis, author of Boy With Thorn

Reviews

"Satisfying and revelatory confessional marked by an aching fury to revise the exclusionary narratives of creation."
— Neyat Yohannes, for Vagabond City Lit

"His gods are the idea of god translated onto men and memories he loves or beds or worships or all of the above."
— Kimberly Ann Southwick, for Ploughshares Blog

"Justin Phillip Reed is a voice worth hearing, the world a bigger and better place because of it."

— Ryan Werner, for Tinderbox Poetry Journal