Lyrical poetry offering multilayered examinations of injustices—from mass incarceration to failing schools and right-wing fascism.
 
Richard Hamilton’s second poetry collection, Discordant, is a searing examination of injustice both within the United States and abroad, from criticisms of the US military-industrial complex and failing healthcare system to multilayered observations of marginalization through the lenses of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Hamilton’s poems look closely at increased austerity measures, commitment to mass incarceration and private prisons, disdain for workers and labor resistance, the expansion of the US military budget, the disappearance of federal subsidies for the working poor, failing schools and teacher shortages, market inflation and price gouging, and the rising tide of right-wing fascism.

Hamilton’s lyrical writing brings together free-form essays and personal narratives full of keen-eyed and urgent observations. Told from the perspective of a speaker who is unemployed and pensive, Hamilton shows how history haunts us while keeping the present in the foreground, constantly challenging oppression that has long been commonplace.

Discordant won the 2022 CAAPP Book Prize, selected by Evie Shockley.
 

"Hamilton’s Discordant at times synthesizes a war correspondent’s urgent observations with a poet’s ability to invent fresh syntax. Always, there is death, whether state-sanctioned or otherwise, that must be reported on and reported to. . . . The forms are varied and interesting while the voice remains emphatic, even rhapsodic at times, in its attempt to find a syntax to understand the systems that aggrieve Black folks in America." - Washington Independent Review of Books