A collection of poetry inspired by music and literary scholarship.

The fourth collection of poetry from the literary and cultural critic Fred Moten, B Jenkins is named after the poet’s mother, who passed away in 2000. It is both an elegy and an inquiry into many of the themes that Moten has explored throughout his career: language, music, performance, improvisation, and the black radical aesthetic and political tradition. In Moten’s verse, the arts, scholarship, and activism intertwine. Cadences echo from his mother’s Arkansas home through African American history and avant-garde jazz riffs. Formal innovations suggest the ways that words, sounds, and music give way to one another.

The first and last poems in the collection are explicitly devoted to Moten’s mother; the others relate more obliquely to her life and legacy. They invoke performers, writers, artists, and thinkers including not only James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Frederick Douglass, Billie Holiday, Audre Lorde, Charlie Parker, and Cecil Taylor, but also contemporary scholars of race, affect, and queer theory. The book concludes with an interview conducted by Charles Henry Rowell, the editor of the journal Callaloo. Rowell elicits Moten’s thoughts on the relation of his poetry to theory, music, and African American vernacular culture.

"“Fred Moten can’t stop won’t stop blurring genres, modes, lexical registers,
disciplines and the whole damn phenomenal world, in an ecstasy of creative
permission so liberating that it verges on the terrifying; this book is almost
too beautiful to read.”" - XCP

"“Like the work of the many subjects of these poems, Moten’s latest book is a nuanced yet exhilarating avant-garde fusion of theory and improvisation.”" - Multicultural Review

"“Poetry as inquiry. Poetry as communication through time, space, and distance. Poetry as a collection of personal connections to people, places, memory. Poetry as elegy. Poetry as commentary. Poetry like’“riding a bus in the city.’ . . . Under the surface is a deeply intellectual inquisition, a purposeful pursuit of understanding: self, culture, family, race, people, music. It is lyrical, polysonic, fresh. Moten is both a “high” theorist and an “experimental” poet. It is poetry in relation to the world through the self. It is not just an imitation of music, but an embodiment of what is at the heart of the music in question. The essential center of it. “" - University of Arizona Poetry Center

"“Riff-rattled and jack-legged, critic and poet Fred Moten conducts the ministers of the ‘Black Arts Movement,’ fusing them into an orchestral procession. . . . Not limited to inspiration from the African Diaspora, Moten calls on a polyphonic nexus of awareness. In an interview at the end, he refers to ‘radical political comportment’ as representing ‘something inextricably bound to escape, fugitivity, criminality.’ There’s no escaping the choral radiance here." - Brooklyn Rail

"As ever with Moten, there is the duty -- the roll is called and the work of pushing arguments and celebrations of black experience and its forms is done . . . [It's] Moten's unique ability to cut down a line, to stop a thought short, that plays more as an ornate visual sketch than call." - Oyster Boy Review