The Ferguson Report: An Erasure

“Redacting the report word by word, letter by letter, Sealey excavates larger lyric insights about American life from its account of police bias and brutality.” —The New Yorker, “The Best Books of 2023” “Peeling back the clinical language of the official government document, poet Sealey creates ‘lifted poems’ that capture the collective rage of the nation, lay bare the visceral grief, and imagine a new vision of liberation.” —Oprah Daily, “The Best Conversation-Starting Books of 2023”“Nicole Sealey’s The Ferguson Report: An Erasure comes to us first in fragments—at times not even syllables, ah or id—but as a feeling, the unsayable constructing itself as we read along or listen. The paced rhythm is almost painfully made as if fleshy blips on the heart meter—a ghostly master text beneath. One feels subliminal truths cumulate out of a visceral engagement, and then the emergence of eight inspired poems.” —Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021

NICOLE SEALEY is the author of Ordinary Beast, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and PEN Open Book Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named. Her honors include a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a visiting professor at Boston University and teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.

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