Description
Book SynopsisA linguistically experimental and socially engaged collection of poems that examines questions of colorism within an economically driven world.
In a collection of poems that collapses the spectrum between the theoretical and the personal, that is at once intimately lyric and researched, Isaac Pickell travels through various borderlands of space, memory, and identity in search of an “original shade.” In failing to find what he’s looking for, the poet is equally drawn to the beauty and cruelty of a world addled by capitalism, careening the reader into collisions with complicity and possibility. Enigmatic and striking,
It’s not over once you figure it out offers rich, layered poetry that is tender with its subjects of generational trauma, liberation, and the Black and Jewish experience.
Trade Review"Isaac Pickell is a poet of jaw-dropping turns of thought—lines looping around their ends with all the torque of a serpentine belt, exploding their premises, rattling expectation. In this rare precision of poetic thought is also care, a care which reminds us that behind each poem is a feeling there’s somebody the poems defend against the brutal foreclosures of this historical moment and the inscriptions this blurb might bring. What’s that? “It’s not over once you figure it out.” I mean, as soon as I read this, I read it again. What are you waiting for?"—Joe Hall, author of Fugue and Strike
"Isaac Pickell’s It's Not Over Once You Figure It Out is a book of repetitions, of history
repeating itself so predictably that the future is burned down by its everlasting flame. Pickell’s speaker collapses time as we know it, and in this timelessness, our fiery and grief-filled present threatens to unravel into the infinite distance. Knowing the history is only half the battle, especially when the present is a 'naïve critic of the future, written futures, within the already has been.' In the discomfort of the past, present, and future becoming one frightening drone, Pickell forces us towards the anxious action of rerouting and rewriting our future."—Dr. Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times
