“It is impossible to do justice to Amorak Huey’s Boom Box within the acceptable word count of a blurb. If you could conjure a collection of poems that mix Bob Hicok’s wry humor, Ada Limón’s candor, Greil Marcus’ knowledge of rock music, and Ernest Cline’s nostalgia for the ’80s, you might start to get close to everything going on in these pages. However, Huey’s poem are all his own. Yes, they are smart and funny but also brilliantly incisive and masterfully crafted. Boom Box is a brave book bolstered by a sense of language and form that lifts the poems out of mere autobiography and into the realm of art.”
—Dean Rader, author of Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry and Works & Days
“If poems are magic, then the poems of Boom Box are rife with the magic of childhood in guitar-solo riffs of splendor and nostalgia. Amidst sweeping narratives, the past stands as a monument to be worshipped instead of forgotten. The sorrow, the thrill, the sex, the music, and the awkwardness, are all captured as if in time capsules—these are poems of loss and marrow and place, of time and the wars it wields. They are profound in their honesty, bittersweet, heartbreaking, yet redemptive. Like a stadium-rock anthem. Like the song thrumming in the background of a life that testifies ‘to love a place is to leave it behind.’”
—Chelsea Dingman, author of What Bodies Have I Moved and Thaw
“Amorak Huey’s Boom Box is a collection chock-full of pop culture references and possibility—‘so many ways this can end.’ Huey’s speaker, intent on arriving at what proves an often slippery narrative and truth offers a rich, prismatic vantage of the most formative events of his life, the year of the divorce, adolescent hunger and thirst among them. The collection deeply explores the duplicitous body ‘capable of all kinds of lies,’ the body in which there’s music as well as the possibility of going boom. Highly imaginative, textured, and nuanced, Huey presents a sometimes brutal look at the family unit, masculinity, failure, and faith as landscape that is always shifting and that, like the Cahaba River itself, is ‘muddy, unceasing.’ He looks, unflinchingly, at ‘the storm we might survive but will not / escape.’ Boom Box is an exciting new collection from an excellent voice!”
—Nathan McClain, author of Scale