"I´m Always so Serious is brilliant. -Terrance Hayes, winner of the National Book Award for Lighthead 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 StreetCould Talk is recast with characters from The 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.
