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9781625571830

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Get Funky, Get Swoll is a tour de force of linguistic agility and cultural dissonance. Through the eyes of Akhim Cabéy, we are given a multilayered and sometimes psychedelic view of America's well-disguised past and its relationship to the glaring present. In its bold vision and raw, emotional frankness, Get Funky, Get Swoll is a journal of resistance, an antidote to the current numbing miasma. What drives the predatory rage that has infected many of our fellow citizens is a deadening stupidity. This book, on many levels, is a cure for that. --Tim Seibles, author of With No Hat

""In Get Funky, Get Swoll, Akhim Yuseff Cabéy delivers a voice that struts, grieves, jokes, and testifies. These poems swing between elegy and satire, oral tradition and formal invention--echoing Baraka and Komunyakaa while carving out an all-new line. In these poems funk is form and swelling is what happens when a spirit refuses to shrink. The language is made of music and muscle, blade and blood. Get Funky, Get Swoll is bold, brilliant, and unmistakably alive, a love letter to language, to friends gone and present, to Black cultural memory, and to the body as vessel and archive. Each poem flexes form like muscle, moving through fury, absurdity, grace, and groove. If Amiri Baraka wrote with Paul Beatty's mic and Yusef Komunyakaa's telescope, the result might sound like this. Get Funky, Get Swoll cuts and cajoles. These are wonderful poems."" --Terrance Hayes, National Book Award Winner, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin ""Akhim Yuseff Cabéy's transfixing collection Get Funky, Get Swoll is technically a debut, though it reads like a volume by an artist who's far into their journey of producing wondrous, textured work. In this collection, Cabéy's voice exquisitely portrays the ways in which the soul survives and flourishes despite America's multi-century addictions to racism, violence, and coerced performance. Cabéy's poems brim with keen comprehensions of history, politics, and culture, and his lines bear lush sound while opening toward fresh discoveries and proclamations. Within these pages live complex portraits of the mind and the heart relentlessly making song and meaning from the bewildering world."" --Marcus Jackson, author of Pardon My Heart

Author Information

AKHIM YUSEFF CABY was born in the Bronx and educated upstate both at Siena College and SUNY Albany. After receiving an MFA from The Ohio State University, he taught at the university level before pivoting to the non-profit sector of adult education. A Pushcart Prize-winning Black author, he is a six-time recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and a Headlands Center for the Arts resident fellow. Winner of the 2024 Palette Poetry Rising Poet Prize, his work has appeared inColorado Review, RHINO, Indiana Review, The Florida Review, Shenandoah,andCallaloo.

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