Distributed by YesYes Books and Ingram
Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Cover Art: Arm Peace, 2022, © Nick Cave, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Author Photo: Cherline Bazile
$18 | 112 pages | ISBN: 978-1-946303-02-8
Poetry l Perfectbound | March 27, 2025
Praise for Strange Flowers
Bryan Byrdlong’s Strange Flowers is a staggering debut that maps the lines and links between the living and undead, ritual and where the speaker belongs. Byrdlong’s exploration of the zombie, from the Caribbean to cocktails, marks what changes us, takes us out of ourselves, and why we long to be transformed.
—Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations and Bestiary
The poems of Strange Flowers seem to want to be spoken like a series of prayers or chants, a beseeching not to right wrongs but to stand together in our witness of them, in our ability to not turn away: “Does anyone else shed/a tear, a smile? Is it just me?” And the sense of desperation Bryan Byrdlong has (or wants us to have for one another) is made all the more clear by just how much the poet labors over every line for a precision aimed toward sublimity. “We have come to/pay respect to our mothers, our mother tongue/which heals, speaks for itself, is here in our collective/magnetic spin, our slew of aphorisms, our revolutionary/lilt, honed,” writes Byrdlong in this beautiful debut.
—Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition and New Testament
Bryan Byrdlong’s Strange Flowers opens with the speaker’s creation myth, his birth by “the white glove’s careless C-section,” mother’s innards unspooled in “attempted anthropomancy,” his exponential growth perceived as menacing, looming, two-headed. It is a birth into a fiery embodiment of death by white culture, wearing the mourning clothes of “black jeans, black hoodie, black menis.” Thus is the origin story of the multivocal American Monster that articulates, sings, and rhapsodizes this epic collection. Whatever notion I held about what makes a book of poems “big,” this book is bigger, in its “family tree’s gigantic, hundred handedness,” its Haiti, its laughter in Creole, its hallucinatory, Joycean sentences and lines and Hurston-like interrogations, its physics and astronomy and history, its blackity-black, its funereal solfège, its leg from Popeye’s-consuming, Christ flesh-chewing, zombiism. If there is a book more alive in its deadness, more dead in its aliveness, and more urgently beautiful in its strange flowering, I haven’t read it.
—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry
Strange Flowers
Strange Flowers available to PreOrder at 20% off!
American Monster
Thursday, I am born,
of the white glove’s careless C-section, twilight
of the gods who couldn’t give my mother
more time, instead unspooled her innards,
attempted anthropomancy, divined her son
a serpent circling the world. My birth
paradoxical, of the myth that this world has
a beginning, an end. To the doctors, my body
grows suspiciously quick. On the block, my head
looms above the branches. Bewitched
by Mercedes, I lose her basketball bet, wear
the pink skirt, pretend rebus, double-headed beast.
Society strikes first. An officer accuses me of looming
over fences. The old heads accuse me of being sweet.
I open my mouth four canines. I open my mouth
& the cujo’s bat-bitten. I open my mouth & Fenrir’s
wild gnawing the hand that feeds. It is the forgotten
eighth day that something inside me dies inside
of my own mouth and putrefaction sets in. Mourning,
I don black jeans, black hoodie, black menis.
A white man crosses the street when he sees: me,
maggots, Muspell, multiple-choices in the form
of one question. What follows? What follows.About the Book
Bryan Byrdlong’s debut Strange Flowers fashions a kind of suit, an armor, a disguise out of the folk and pop cultural creation of the zombie. In response to historical prejudice, but more specifically in response to fear of Black people in America, the poetry in this collection uses the idea of the zombie to offer an unbiased view of Black struggle, the zombie being a suit sometimes forced upon Black people and sometimes worn willingly.
About the Author
Bryan Byrdlong is a Black poet from Chicago, Illinois. His debut poetry collection, Strange Flowers, is out from YesYes Books in 2025. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Helen Zell Writers Program and has been published in Guernica Magazine, The Kenyon Review, and Poetry Magazine, among others. Bryan received a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at USC in Los Angeles. Bryan is a Cave Canem fellow.
