Mixology

Selected for the 2008 National Poetry Series by Kevin Young

Penguin Books (May 2009), 96 Pages, 5-1/2 x 8-7/16 inches, ISBN 9780143115830, $18.00

Purchase: Your local bookstore (Indiebound) / Penguin

From the Publisher: The poems in Adrian Matejka’s second collection, Mixology, shapeshift through the myriad meanings of “mixing” to explore and explode ideas of race, skin politics, appropriation, and cultural identity. Whether the focus of the individual poems is musical, digital, or historical, the otherness implicit in being of more than one racial background guides Matejka’s work to the inevitable conclusion that all things-no matter how disparate-are parts of the whole.

Praise & Reviews

"Adrian Matejka provides a profound and powerful cocktail of personal history, hip hop elegy, and inventive language, measuring a clash of emotions and cultures with fat bass lines and sharp wit. A post-soul tour de force that places pop culture in a blender.”

— Kevin Young, 2008 National Poetry Series judge

"Adrian Matejka sings the body politic electric, eclectic, euphoric. Agile as Olympic gymnasts, these smart, tight lyrics are bursting with young hunger, frisky identity mashups, and tasty sonics. Matejka's particular mix of surge and control, vigor and craft is awesome, dizzying. His elegies are tender manifestos. Each poem's spits sparks, a pint sized power station. Mixology unleashes a genie that cannot EVER be stuffed back into his bottle. America: welcome to your new Mixologist Laureate."

— Amy Gerstler

"'I got me two songs instead/of eyes - all swollen and blacked/out like the day after a lost fight.' I read a line like that and know this poet is a street-talking surrealist, someone down-home and intergalactic. He weaves the likes of Fela Kuti and Wassily Kandinsky, Allen Iverson and Bob Kaufman, into poems of meditation and mischief. Here the pathos and charm of good old-fashioned storytelling is wedded to the associative freedoms of music and collage. Heady, funky, motley: this Adrian Matejka is truly a poet of the new century."
— Terrance Hayes