Resilient Skin, With Love. And Merry Christmas.

A year ends. A note for those who made it through carrying wounds, disillusions, songs, and the quiet dignity of staying. Because sometimes, the bravest thing we do is insist on tenderness.

BEATITUDE

by John Keene

Love everything
Love the sky and sea, trees and rivers,
mountains and abysses.
Love animals, and not just because you are one.
Love your parents and your children,
even if you have none.
Love your spouse or partner,
no matter what either word means to you.
Love until you create a cavern in your loving,
until it seethes like a volcano.
Love everytime.
Love your enemies.
Love the enemies of your enemies.
Love those whose very idea of love is hate.
Love the liars and the fakes.
Love the tattletales and the hypercrits, the hucksters and the traitors.
Love the thieves because everyone has thought
of stealing something at least once.
Love the rich who live only to empty
your purse or wallet.
Love the poverty of your empty coin purse or wallet.
Love your piss and sweat and shit.
Love your and others’ chatter and its proof of the expansiveness
of nothingness.
Love your shadows and their silent censure.
Love your fears, yesterday’s and tomorrow’s.
Love your yesterdays and tomorrows.
Love your beginning and your end.
Love the fact that your end is another beginning,
or could be, for someone else.
Love yourself, but not too much
that you cannot love everything and everyone else.
Love everywhere.
Love in the absence of love.
Love the monsters breeding
in every corner of the city and suburb,
all throughout the soil of the countryside.
Love the monster breeding inside you and slaughter him
with love.
Love the shipwreck of your body, your mind’s
salted garden.
Love love.

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Sometimes, the only honest way to survive is to sing hard, “as hard as life itself.”

That is the pulse running through Punks: New & Selected Poems, by John Keene: a book that refuses neutrality, that chooses combustion over contemplation, that turns archive into movement. It doesn’t merely gather decades of writing: it restages them as a living, insurgent, plural body.

Keene had already signaled his power in Annotations and Counternarratives. But it is in Punks that his voice reaches a turning point: more than an author, he emerges here as an archivist of the unnamable, a cartographer of what official history chose to forget — and what poetry, when sharpened, dares to remember.

With each page, the language shifts, as if shedding skin.

Form here is not ornament; it is a tool, it is a blade, it is music.

And what does it cut?

Silencing. Erasure. The comfort of fixed categories.

Keene summons an unruly chorus of Black presences, intimate and historical: bodies in bars, in bedrooms, in emotional trenches. These are voices that sing mourning without losing the rhythm of joy, that traverse AIDS and oppression with the same breath that claims love and desire. They are lovers, friends, ghosts. And no one here asks permission to fit into a single narrative.

There is, in fact, something of the ethics of harm reduction in this book: a radical listening to forms of life that endure even when wounded, that create beauty even when marginalized. Lives not seeking moral cure, but dignity and continuity.

Poetry here becomes, in many ways, a form of care. Not a care that domesticates, but a care that acknowledges the wound without trying to erase it, violate it, or silence it; it directs love toward the wound that holds pain and desire as inseparable facets of survival.

This is not a book about identity. It is a work that acts upon identity. That unsettles it. That insists: poetry doesn’t need to explain itself, it needs to exist. With thickness. With contradiction. With desire.

Punks does not describe history. It keeps it raw. And in doing so, it transforms it, as if wrapping it in a skin that is both resistant and radiant.

If I could, this would be the Christmas gift I’d give each of you.

Merry Christmas.

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