Imperial Liquor

Poems

Amaud Jamaul Johnson

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822987291
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Imperial Liquor is a chronicle of melancholy, a reaction to the monotony of racism. These poems concern loneliness, fear, fatigue, rage, and love; they hold fatherhood held against the vulnerability of the black male body, aging, and urban decay. Part remembrance, part swan song for the Compton, California of the 1980s, Johnson examines the limitations of romance to heal broken relationships or rebuild a broken city. Slow Jams, red-lit rooms, cheap liquor, like seduction and betrayal—what's more American? This book tracks echoes, rides the residue of music "after the love is gone."

Smokey

the most dangerous men
in my neighborhood
only listened to love songs

to reach those notes
a musicologist told me
a man essentially cuts

his own throat. some nights
even now, i'll hear a falsetto
and think i should run

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Smokey
• LA Police Chief Daryl Gates Dead at 83
• What Spells Trouble
• Crips and Bloods
• Delfonic
• Somebody told me we got LA
• Tar Baby
• Prince George’s County
• Line of Reason
• Picturing My Father Running Anywhere (and For What?)
• The Authority
• How often I’ve turned to Latasha Harlins, who would have been 43 this July
• Jailbird Blues
• No More Birminghams
• Midnight Special
• The Snooty Fox
• As in . . . Afro-Pessimism?
• Dog Star Rising
• Place Your Bets
• Grief
• On Becoming River Rat, Fat-Tongued and/or Finding Your Once Pretty Body at the Park, Full of Holes
• Eye Witness
• Other Women’s Children
• Don’t Forget You(r) Lunch
• poem in which i attempt to explain to my sons . . .
• What Was Ocean
• The Whipping
• The Wall
• The Curiosities
• Like a Natural Man
• Worry the Rosemary
• “Young Hearts, Run Free” (’76)
• When Miss Lucy Sings
• Black Dragons
• This Bitter Earth
• Nothing But a Man
• Featuring Lonette Mckee as Sister
• Fred Williamson Stars as “The Hammer”
• Gator Purify
• Black Dragons
• Pacman
• Another Epitaph for Nino
• The Human Tornado
• Raising Hell
• Waiting
• Priest and the Revolution
• DeBarge
• Mystery Woman Speaks 30 Years Later
• Doo-Wop
• Black Diaspora
• Strawberry
• Other Acts of Terror
• The Midsection
• If not as in a wilderness, then
• Women Named Barbara
• Between Work
• Estrella @ Noon
• Affirmative Action Babies
• Acknowledgments