Darktown Follies

“In these poems Amaud Jamaul Johnson channels a confluence of Robert Hayden, Frederick Douglass, and Dave Chappelle to create a synergistic poetry that sings the lyric, chants down babylon, and makes your head spin with the ironic twists of history seated on the front porch of the present. Darktown Follies is an acutely discerning book that challenges the reader’s sense of blackness in the American landscape. Intimate, intellectual, and incredibly funny, this is poetry carved from a past that can only be seen in the light of this moment.” —Matthew Shenoda

Darktown Follies, Amaud Jamaul Johnson’s daring and surprising new collection of poems, responds to Black Vaudeville, specifically the personal and professional challenges African American variety performers faced in the early twentieth century. Johnson is fascinated by jokes that aren’t funny — particularly, what it means when humor fails or reveals something unintended about our national character. Darktown Follies is an act of self-sabotage, a poet’s willful attempt at recklessness, abandoning the “good sense” God gave him, as an effort to explore the boundaries and intersections of race and humor.