Refuse

Julian Randall

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780822986171
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Set against the backdrop of the Obama presidency, Julian Randall's Refuse documents a young biracial man's journey through the mythos of Blackness, Latinidad, family, sexuality and a hostile American landscape. Mapping the relationship between father and son caught in a lineage of grief and inherited Black trauma, Randall conjures reflections from mythical figures such as Icarus, Narcissus and the absent Frank Ocean. Not merely a story of the wound but the salve, Refuse is a poetry debut that accepts that every song must end before walking confidently into the next music.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Icarus
• A Thousand Cardinals
• Biracial Ghazal: Why Everything Ends in Blood
• This Land Is Where We Buried Everything That Came Before You: African American History and Concepts of Ownership in Early Elementary Education
• Friday Night Lights #1
• In A Rare Moment of Nostalgia My Father Reflects on Obama’s First Inauguration
• Taxonomy Regarding My Mother
• I Think Everybody Has a Year They Never Really Leave
• Summer After
• Elegy for the Winter after Taina Was Cancelled
• Chicago*
• Wasn’t the Minotaur Buried Horns First: Vulnerability and Identity in the Mythic Body
• A Poem about Trees That Is Not Actually a Poem about Trees
• Nearly 7 Years after the Fact a Boy Whose Nose I Nearly Broke Hits Me Up for Brunch
• In the Netflix Trailer Obama Says “I Don’t Fit in Anywhere” While Anthony Hamilton Pulls a Burning City Out of His Mouth
• Obama Says “Mutts Like Me” in the Mirror Every Morning While I Get Ready for School
• The Academy of Acceptable Loss
• Pregame Prayer with Complete Citations
• Coverage
• You Got McDonald’s Money?
• Friday Night Lights #20
• Friday Night Lights #51
• The Spook Who Sat by the Once Bombed City: Psychological Explorations of Ancestral Memory Through the Lens of Racial Battle Trauma
• The Space Between Skins Is Called a Wound
• Translation
• On The Night I Consider Coming Out to My Parents
• (Self) Inflicted
• Frank Ocean Sighting #268: Frank Ocean Is Rumored to Speak of Rivers Which Is Likely a Lie (Disc 1)
• Narcissus
• The Author Is Often Mistaken for Obama’s Long Lost Son
• Insomniac Soliloquy
• My Father Watches Ferguson Vol. 1
• Portrait of My Father as Sisyphus
• My Father Watches Ferguson Vol. 2
• Palinopsia
• Police Dream #607
• Palinopsia
• Elegy for the Summer after Django Unchained Came Out on DVD
• Palinopsia
• Regrets
• Ghazal for the Suicidal Thought
• Palinopsia
• The Search for Frank Ocean or a Brief History of Disappearing
• Variation on a Theme of Genetics
• Leslie Odom Jr. Sings Obama’s Anger on NPR
• Mercy, Mercy, Him
• Tanka for the 4th of July
• Zealots of Stockholm or Elegy for the Still Alive
• Obama Wants to Be Clear about His Legacy
• Obama Speaks of Rivers but We Have Always Been on Different Shores
• Negrotopia #3
• Sad Nigga Manifesto
• Acknowledgments