Strange Flowers

Bryan Byrdlong's debut Strange Flowers fashions a kind of suit, an armor, a disguise out of the folk and pop cultural creation of the zombie. In response to historical prejudice, but more specifically in response to fear of Black people in America, the poetry in this collection uses the idea of the zombie to offer an unbiased view of Black struggle, the zombie being a suit sometimes forced upon Black people and sometimes worn willingly. Bryan Byrdlong's Strange Flowers is a staggering debut that maps the lines and links between the living and undead, ritual and where the speaker belongs. Byrdlong's exploration of the zombie, from the Caribbean to cocktails, marks what changes us, takes us out of ourselves, and why we long to be transformed. -Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations and Bestiary The poems of Strange Flowers seem to want to be spoken like a series of prayers or chants, a beseeching not to right wrongs but to stand together in our witness of them, in our ability to not turn away: "Does anyone else shed/a tear, a smile? Is it just me?" And the sense of desperation Bryan Byrdlong has (or wants us to have for one another) is made all the more clear by just how much the poet labors over every line for a precision aimed toward sublimity. "We have come to/pay respect to our mothers, our mother tongue/which heals, speaks for itself, is here in our collective/magnetic spin, our slew of aphorisms, our revolutionary/lilt, honed," writes Byrdlong in this beautiful debut. -Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition and New Testament Bryan Byrdlong's Strange Flowers opens with the speaker's creation myth, his birth by "the white glove's careless C-section," mother's innards unspooled in "attempted anthropomancy," his exponential growth perceived as menacing, looming, two-headed. It is a birth into a fiery embodiment of death by white culture, wearing the mourning clothes of "black jeans, black hoodie, black menis." Thus is the origin story of the multivocal American Monster that articulates, sings, and rhapsodizes this epic collection. -Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry