PRAISE for On All Fronts

 

Derrick Weston Brown’s On All Fronts is a block party of emotions. Here, the mood shifts quickly from D’Angelo to Ghostface Killah. Brown’s speakers ride the green line, earhustling for round-the-way gossip. They also “…weep, at…black womanless streets.” To the elder throwing shade, they say, “ain’t no besting ‘these bars.'” These poems earned every damn “right to coat each tooth in” gold.

—Alan King, author of Drift and Point Blank

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I am glad to have lived long enough to see and feel (and revisit like a much needed friend) Derrick Weston Brown’s “On All Fronts”. These poems are replete with originality (remember saxophonist Lester Young’s artistic credo “You got to be original, man!”) technical and emotional range, and—most importantly—feeling. They entrance the reader; and they make you rethink the world around (and inside) you. Read and re-read and re-read these poems. And recite them out loud. because they are also as musical as a kiss. Lucky us, world. Lucky us.

—Reuben Jackson, poet and author of Fingering The Keys

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PRAISE for Wisdom Teeth

 

"This brilliant first effort is akin to a mixtape, filled with nostalgic hip-hop references—MF Doom, A Tribe Called Quest, and J Dilla, among others—a love letter from a grown man still much enamored of the youth culture today. Found here are playful experiments with the eintou, bop, and brownku, African American forms seldom approached with such mastery."  

—Simone Jacobson, managing editor for Words. Beats. Life: The Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture

 

“We need more songs like this young man’s right here. Truth cuts its way beneath the unspoken like new teeth on their way to light.  Son of Langston, come on through.” 

—Ruth Forman award winning children’s book writer, poet, and author of Prayers Like Shoes (2009)

 

"Derrick Weston Brown ventures into the canon to echo the voices of Morrison’s Sweet Home Men, then bends his ear to the streets of DC to render the shouts and whispers of corner brawls and slapped down dominoes—all the while balancing the bridge between Ellington and the sacred tribes of hip-hop." 

—Tyehimba Jess, 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Winner, author of Leadbelly (2005), Olio (2016)

 

"Full of wit and whimsy, Wisdom Teeth postulates a poetics of heart-whole appreciation and honesty—for love and life, for family and friends, for literature and history, for pop culture and the poet's ever-cognizant powers of observation." 

— Dr. Tony Medina, Professor of Creative Writing, Howard University, author of My Old Man Was always on the Lam, Broke on Ice, I and I, and An Onion of Wars