Derek Says: Recipient of the 2022 International Griffin Prize, Douglas Kearney brings a spoken, performative poetry to the page in a form which fully embraces breath and cacophony unpacking the racialized spaces of contemporary poetry. Optic Subwoof, published as part of Wave books’ Bagley Wright Lecture Series, gathers Kearney’s talks and lectures – but these are far from dry academic treatises, every chapter crackles with the urgency of voice, politic, performance, and dizzying possibility.