Winner
of the 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Prize
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
