How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children

• How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children
• Price: $16.00
• 978-1-949540-20-8
• October 15, 2021
• Poetry - PB
• Pages - 84
• Quincy Scott Jones

C&R Press 2020 Poetry Book Award

MEET THE AUTHOR

We asked Quincy Scott Jones two questions. Why did you write How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children and why do you write poetry?

“I wrote How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children because I was angry, then I was sad.  I hope the book brings joy.”–Quincy Scott Jones

“I write poetry because my ancestors wrote poetry, except they just called it ‘talkin ’.”–Quincy Scott Jones

AWARDS

C&R Press 2020 Poetry Book Award
IPPY Gold Award in Poetry

REVIEWS

Heavy Feather Review

CHARITABLE

10% of all profits from the sale of this book will be donated by C&R Press to Black Women’s Blueprint

How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children is also available as an eBook

ABOUT

Renisha McBride.  Tamir Rice.  Jordan Davis.  Trayvon Martin.  Michael Brown.  Freddie Gray.  Aiyana Stanley-Jones.  At a certain point, BIPOC families must have “the Conversation,” a discussion and set of instructions for surviving a world of policing, presumed guilt, and the racial inequities that threaten our very lives.  It’s labeled “the Conversation,” but this discussion is never an intimate moment, never a one-time event.  Instead it’s a constant choir of dissent and disembodied voices whispering and wailing night and day.  Through a mix of lyric, found text, and hybridity, How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children highlights some of these voices:  adults and children, murderers and victims, bookshelves and wanted posters, carnival barkers and political pundits. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s “Power” How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children calls upon the past and present in an attempt to find a language higher than the circular rhetoric that falls in and out of mass media, to hold a conversation that is constant even in silence, to escape the cycle of violence and Black death.

PRAISE

“These poems are dying to stay tender in the plumage of rage. These poems are cry-laughing to keep from killing somebody. These poems are the knife’s edge of nightmare scoring the fertile threshold of song. They unflinchingly ask and answer: What use is a poem on this American killing floor and its cooling board of rhetoric?”
—Yolanda Wisher, author of Monk Eats an Afro, 3^rd Poet Laureate of Philadelphia

PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS WORK

“Quincy Scott Jones’ poems are wise and sinewy. He has a way of observing what is right in front of him as well as what used to be there, and what might be coming. He translates the voices and journeys of people that inhabit the charged physical and emotional landscapes he’s travelled, bearing witness to the gamut of these experiences.”
—Kamilah Aisha Moon, author of Starshine & Clay

“Quincy Scott Jones has the courage to take on the most difficult and vital subjects with stunning integrity and imagination.  He’s the kind of writer our culture needs desperately.”
—D. Nurkse, author of Love in the Last Days