I’m Always So Serious

“I’m Always so Seriousis brilliant.”–Terrance Hayes, winner of the National Book Award forLighthead

Karisma Price’s stunning debut collection is an extendedmeditation on Blackness, on family, on loss. Anchored in New Orleans and NewYork City, these poems braid personal and public histories into a culturalreckoning of past and present. James Booker speaks to Ringo Starr, a phone “Autocorrects‘Nigga’ to Night, ‘”If Beale Street
Could Talkis recast with characters fromThe Odyssey.In these pages there is grief, there is absence, thereis violence–“Weknow that mostly everything around us / is measured in blood.”–but there isalso immense love and truth. Karisma Price has created a serious masterpiece, abook “so dark you have no other option but to call it / precious.”

Karisma Price is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection “I’m Always so Serious” (Sarabande Books, 2023). Her work has appeared inPoetry, Four Way Review, Wildness, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem and New York University, was a finalist for the 2019 Manchester Poetry Prize, and awarded The 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from The Poetry Foundation. She is from New Orleans, LA, and holds an MFA in poetry from New York University. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Poetry at Tulane University.

• Publisher:Sarabande Books (February 14, 2023)
• Language:English
• Paperback:92 pages
• ISBN-10:1956046046
• ISBN-13:9781956046045
• Item Weight:6.4 ounces
• Dimensions:6.4 x 0.4 x 8.9 inches