Not Your Mama's Melting Pot (The Backwaters Prize in Poetry)

Selected by Bob Hicok as Winner of the 2017 Backwaters Press Prize

"From jump, there was such sonic, emotional, and intellectual drive to these poems, that I couldn't resist--why would I want to--the pull of Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley's vision and sensibility. Verve and élan are words I might use, but they lack sufficient verve and élan. And if I wrote, 'his future is bright, ' I'd be wrong--his future is here, and this book is as much fire as I can ask for."
--Bob Hicok, author of Hold

"At turns, mixing and remixing form, lineage, and landscape, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley's debut unveils a world of tender witness, beginning with the street, moving through history, and ending with reclamation of wild possibility. Here is a collection itchy to witness all the lives that have formed it. Brotherhood. Family stories. Hard music, rhythm. The lines bob, weave, and juke. They gap. Restless, this is the stuff of a multitudinous life. Dense, replete with daring imagery, elegiac, celebratory, urgent, this astonishing collection startles you with its virtuosity and refuses to be pinned down."
--Cathy Linh Che, author of Split