Heed the Hollow introduces the work of Malcolm Tariq, whose poems explore the concept of "the bottom" across blackness, sexuality, and the American South. These lyrics of queer desire meet the voices of enslaved ancestors to reckon with a lineage of trauma that manifests as silence, pain, and haunting memories, but also as want and love. In bops, lyrics, and erasures, Heed the Hollow tells of a heritage anchored to the landscape of the coastal South, to seawalls shaped by forced labor, and to the people "marked into the bottom / of history where then now / we find no shadow of life." From that shadow, the voices in these poems make their own brightness, reclaiming their histories from a language that evolved to exclude them. With an introduction by Chris Abani, Heed the Hollow exults in the spiritual and the physical, in its blackness and eroticism, and in the beauty of touch and music.

The stirring debut from the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected and introduced by Chris Abani

About the Author
Malcolm Tariq is from Savannah, Georgia, and is the author of Extended Play, winner of the 2017 Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. A graduate of Emory University, he has a PhD in English from the University of Michigan. He lives in New York.


Book Information
ISBN 9781644450093
Author Malcolm Tariq
Format Paperback
Page Count 88
Imprint Graywolf Press,U.S.
Publisher Graywolf Press,U.S.
Weight(grams) 200g
Dimensions(mm) 228mm * 153mm * 12mm