I'm Always So Serious - Paperback

by Karisma Price (Author)

"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 extended meditation on Blackness, on family, on loss. Anchored in New Orleans and New York City, these poems braid personal and public histories into a cultural reckoning of past and present. James Booker speaks to Ringo Starr, a phone "Autocorrects 'Nigga' to Night, '" If Beale Street Could Talk is recast with characters from The Odyssey. In these pages there is grief, there is absence, there is violence--"We know that mostly everything around us / is measured in blood."--but there is also immense love and truth. Karisma Price has created a serious masterpiece, a book "so dark you have no other option but to call it / precious."

Author Biography

Karisma Price is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection "I'm Always so Serious" (Sarabande Books, 2023). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Four Way Review, Wildness, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem and New York University, was a finalist for the 2019 Manchester Poetry Prize, and awarded The 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from The Poetry Foundation. She is from New Orleans, LA, and holds an MFA in poetry from New York University. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Poetry at Tulane University.