Mud Jubilee

An exploration of black masculinity, love, grief, loneliness, and desire, from nationally-known spoken word artist and author of The Book of Silence: Manhood as a Pseudoscience, Rasheed Copeland.

I winced while moving through Mud Jubilee, not because of the familiar father who “would wind his hand/before it fried” but for the many moments Copeland testifies about unseen psychic bruises, for the way they made me remember how I have been trained to not see, or not be, a man wounded like this, how that reaction in itself is a wound I must be carrying. Thankfully, these poems enact and explore healing via the candor and kindness of their language. This book works to save the language of self-healing and self-love from the social marketplace that has attempted to seize and sell it. When you pick at the knot of blkness and masculinity, you get a book like this whose untangled threads privilege wholeness as a function of active presence, not crude ownership.

--Kyle Dargan, author of Anagnorisis: Poems

Rasheed Copleland’s Mud Jubilee feels like a gentle invitation to walk alongside a man reckoning with all the conditions of this world that have moved him to keep his pain hidden: an invitation into the quiet space of his interior tussling with what he presents on the outside to keep going, survive. He says and for as long as I can remember/I have lived in the gash of my yearning and I am sure I’m bearing witness to the intimacy of a man’s exhaustion with upholding the endless outdated tropes of cisgender manhood. A gentle call to sit in the front row of a long look in the mirror as he interrogates both the harms caused and experienced under the guise of being strong, fine, okay. Mud Jubilee is a masterful collection of poems more concerned with healing and undoing than saving face, making Copeland a poet to watch ling into the future.

--Candice Iloh, author of Every Body Looking

I have known Rasheed Copeland’s writing for a decade now, and I am always struck by the way his work expands my imagination. The poems in Mud Jubilee go down like cool water, they nourished me in ways I didn’t know I needed. They are intimate, they are urgent, they are probing, they are tender. This collection is a gift.

--Clint Smith, author of How The Word is Passed