Bound: Poems

by Jubi Arriola-Headley

Release Date: February 6, 2024
ISBN: 978-0-89255-578-9
$18.00 | Paperback; 80 Pages
Publisher: Persea Books (info@perseabooks.com)

The poems in Bound seek to carve a space in the world for Blackness and queerness that isn’t defined by trauma or lack, where Black and queer folks can seriously play, can create and conjure the worlds they want to live and love in. Beginning with a takedown of the God concept and moving through an incitement to revolution, Jubi Arriola-Headley plays with conventional notions of race, sex, sexuality, gender, and pleasure, tearing down what we didn’t build to make room for what’s coming.

ADVANCE PRAISE for Bound:

“Jubi Arriola-Headley’s sophomore poetry collection reminds us that a jubilant and cunning black queerness is an answer to the joyless self-righteousness of a white godhead that has led to so many failures of masculinity modeled in its image. In a world that has been (mis)taken and (mis)shapen by man, these poems arrive like secrets, carrying “our scars and our memories” in lyrics generous and ebullient, with sass, love, and ancestral wisdom. In missives to nether regions, lost men, and gaggles of aunties, what a pleasure to read these trickster poems, “as if that’s an icky thing to be.” This book shows us how the world ought to be thought about, and will be one of the best and most complete poetry books you’ll read this year.”

— LILLIAN-YVONNE BERTRAM, author of Negative Money & Travesty Generator

“Jubi Arriola-Headley's poems are essential to me in this complicated, painful, and ultimately luminous world. Jubi's poems, with their rigorous attention to craft and play teach me how I might reimagine the world I write in and live in. What is it to find freedom, joy, and true liberation in the spaces that we are told will destroy us? What is it to say that one will find love and celebration instead? Jubi's poems help me plot a new path. This is an essential book to have in the world right now and ever after.”

— GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI, author of Rocket Fantastic & Apocalyptic Swing

The poems in Bound are anything but bound. They are formally capacious as they navigate desire, masculinity, the body, queerness, and race with such skill and heart. I love Jubi Arriola-Headley’s poems. They are big. They are bright. They weep. They soil. They weight. They parse, think, and challenge. One poem asks: “Can you perceive your edges? Do you bleed and blend into surrounding painscape?” This book does—it perceives the edges of what it means to be human and bleeds and blends all the feelings. 

— VICTORIA CHANG, author of OBIT & The Trees Witness Everything

“Jubi Arriola-Headley’s Bound left me spellbound. In poem after poem Arriola-Headley shows how to plumb into the very heart of feeling through poetry’s unique means, with a lyric assurance, formal variety, captivating sensibility, and lambent humor distinctly his own. Bound confirms he is one of our best!”

— JOHN KEENE, author of Punks: New & Selected Poems