Keith Donnell Jr.
poet ~ editor ~ activist
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In supreme night, anti-Blackness recedes with the setting sun. In Donnell’s imagination, like poets before, the emergent darkness, its familiarity, mysteriousness, and opacity, is a transcendent gift, providing the cover to live beyond the constraints imposed in daylight. These nights are not free of horror and tragedy, nor are they free of love, humor, anger or regret. The supreme night envelopes all that memory preserves, bends, and fabricates.
As a book of poetry, it weaves voices, subjects, and forms into a single composition. Its stories, lyrics, monologues, and found material twist, bend, and cycle through, coalescing to memorialize the legacies of Black lives in America.
Unique and ambitious in scope, supreme night presents a fractured song of witness, a romance with the veil. Its vibrant rhythms and varied themes subvert the expected to celebrate dissemblance, and the poet as keeper of shared knowledge and rogue histories.
PRAISE
Inventive—a tongue free of fear, a language of Black alternativism and folk music. A heaven built brick by brick, reclamation by reclamation. Damn. I’m surrounded here in supreme night, first by myth then by rhythm. Donnell writes, “A sermon, a subverter, no anomaly/ All that rumble young man, rumble.” And ain’t it like a poet to use a collective fist towards rapture. These poems swing back, swing first. There is a place for us here in these poems. A salve for the burdened. A night worth wading.
-Daniel B. Summerhill, Author of Divine, Divine, Divine & Mausoleum of Flowers
Keith Donnell Jr. has succeeded in producing a genius poetic epic of linked and yet independent poems that explore fugitivity and liberation in a sustained indictment of the State. supreme night interweaves history and condemnation of contemporary state-sanctioned violence through a maneuver of collapsing time and place. What has happened continues to happen and has an impact on the future dreamings that germinate in this moment. He has a way of holding attention to multiple time periods while engaging in assured use of poetic formal experimentation, including the creation of his own forms. The book incorporates such rich voices and music that it could easily serve as libretto, inviting theatre or operatic production to reveal through performance the clearly evident layeredness of the poems. On the page, he’s just nice with it: the language, the history, in indictments of state-sanctioned violence particularly against young people, the invocation of multiple voices, the allusions to Black musical and spiritual traditions. He’s just nice with it. If you have your Black card, your head might automatically nod in appreciation and affirmation. If you have never been invited to the Cookout and might not ever be, you still will find instruction on how to best discover all the meat and gristle on the bone. Buy the book and get down to studying these moves; you might interrogate your own history; you might just be changed for the better.
–Raina J. León, author of black god mother this body
Keith Donnell Jr. taps a cultural archive of voices, forms, and intergenerational absence. His poems, so connected by difference, speak across time, place, and persona, always reaching toward song and the dream of a fluid, indestructible beating Black heart. The Move puts the cold out and keeps it there.
Available for Purchase
The Move by Keith Donnell Jr.
FEBRUARY 2022
The oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world.
Featuring:
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Muna Abdulahi
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Keith Donnell Jr.
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Julia Wong Kcomt
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Ninamarie Ochoa
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Jeremy Michael Clark
Featured Poems from Keith Donnell Jr.
Bio
Keith Donnell Jr., originally from Philly, is a Bay Area poet and book editor.
He received his MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State and his MA in English from the University of Southern California. He was the 2017-2018 Editor-in-Chief of Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review and has taught in SFSU’s Creative Writing Department. Keith’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including POETRY, Puerto del Sol’s Black Voices Series and the 2019 edition of Best American Non-required Reading.
He lives in Seaside, CA with his wife, Alivia, and two cats, Ember and Mika.
His first poetry collection, The Move (Nomadic Press), was released Fall 2021. His next collection titled supreme night is available for pre-order, to be released April 2025 by Black Lawrence Press.
