Justin Phillip Reed

ON Indecency

My relationship to the word begins, as do most things in my life, with my momma. Her bedroom was at the "back" of our house. If ever we'd have company come over unannounced and she were unprepared, she'd call out through the bedroom's cracked or closed door, "I'm not decent!" She'd be in the middle of rest or recovering from the day or week, and here comes another demand for attention and action.

For me, indecency is akin to vulnerability, which runs the spine of the book. I tend to call the poems "little rooms," not unlike Momma's, where the threat of intrusion is thoroughly felt. The nation-state is always on the threshold or coming down the hallway with its violent systems, demanding that you get dressed and perform the striptease of citizenship and be consumed and shut up about it. I think you're right to be suspicious: you, the reader doesn’t know who is in each room or what kind of state they're in, and you in turn may not be trusted there, for good reason.

The title felt right when I realized how much time the poems' speakers spent in confines, recovering or disturbed or detained there, contending with the exterior agents of oppression and control, living a life shaped by even the threat of those agents… Overall, the book asks this exact question of its reader.