The Move

Keith Donnell Jr. taps a cultural archive of voices, forms, and intergenerational absence. His poems, so connected by difference, speak across time, place, and persona, always reaching toward song and the dream of a fluid, indestructible beating Black heart. THE MOVE puts the cold out and keeps it there.
“ If one is seeking directions to a free imagination in the land of social death, Keith Donnell Jr.’ s THE MOVE is the perfect roadmap. The long duré e of slavery— in the present— is traversed in these poems. Reading these poems, one experiences the Black unconscious teaching the Black conscious mind how to set itself free even as we live and die in the hold of the ship. Donnell’ s cadence, rhythmic rather than metric, and the pulse of Black, blood-stuffed lives make me think of Jayne Cortez, Michael S. Harper, Cornelius Eady.” — Frank Wilderson III

Keith Donnell Jr. is a Philly born poet, writer, and book editor. He is the author of The Move (Nomadic Press, 2021), and his work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including POETRY and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Donnell received his MFA from San Francisco State University, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review. He currently lives in Salinas, CA.