Red Summer

Poetry. RED SUMMER, Amaud Jamaul Johnson's haunting debut collection, explores a rash of race riots that swept the United States during the summer of 1919. With a tender lyrical quality, reminiscent of the blues, Johnson moves through trauma and personal catastrophe to champion the endurance of the human spirit: "Come, look at him, at all his goods,/ how his whole body becomes song,/ an aria of light, a psalm's kaleidoscope." "Johnson's RED SUMMER startles and impresses with its sheer range of vision, at one moment giving us a hushed, confessional poem, at another a poem of public, political consciousness"--Carl Phillips.