SON OF BYFORD is a meandering mining of meaning from the memory of many middle passages. This collection refracts 1970s shades of Black and blues that give way to hip hop, post-millennium tensions, and godless queer queryings, informed by love, conviction, and hope. SON OF BYFORD is Juba Kalamka’s first book.

Published by Nomadic Press July 9, 2022
NomadicPress.org

PRAiSE FOR SON OF BYFORD
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“Son of Byford drops truths like science, a Black queermemorizing that simultaneously refutes and ticks identity boxes we've been told can never, ever possibly intersect. Kalamka's poems are an act of love, a necessary gift of spacemaking.”
Nalo Hopkinson, author of Brown Girl in the Ring
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“Punk and delicious/Faggot and viscous/A boy who is cunt/
No longer fictitious.”
-Dazié Grego-Sykes, author of Black Faggotry
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The word “outspoken” is so weak when applied to Juba Kalamka – “real-spoken” is much closer. His personal/cultural narrative work in Son of Byford sinks in deep by being just that – so goddamn real. The spoken part is there too – this is hybrid verbal work….these words fly off the page into your face and ears with all kinds of language, preaching and sextalking, marking history and erasures, summoning, enacting and embodying a frank lingua, sounding blood and truth.
-Richard Loranger, author of Unit of Agency

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"Son of Byford is the poetry we need right now: urgent, erudite, ferocious and tender. Give this book to all of your friends who are righteous, and maybe some of the ones who need to become more righteous, too."
-Charlie Jane Anders, author of Never Say You Can’t Survive and All the Birds in the Sky
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“I've been waiting for this book for so many years. Son of Byford is an epic compilation of Juba Kalamka's work over the years and it is also right on time, the poetry we need to read in this moment of forever pandemic/eugenics war/fascism/all-out war on us. It is work for all of us. Juba's work always hits all the layers - of Black queer disabled pervert, of all the ones who the other ones don’t want around. Juba remembers everything and his work helps us remember our dead, our past selves and the ones they want us to forget, including ourselves. Read this book. I'm so glad it's here."

- Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha,
author of Care Work, Tonguebreaker, and The Future Is Disabled.

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PUBLICATION DETAILS

July 2022 • 5.5 x 7.5 • 140 pp. • Trade Paper

ISBN: 978-1-955239-31-8

Cover art by Wardell McNeal

Cover and interior design by Jevohn Tyler Newsome

Edited by Noelia Cerna