Nathaniel Mackey is of the most celebrated poets emerging from the Black Radical Tradition. The New York Times described him as a writer of “realist-mythic layering of lyrical prose unlike anything being written today”. His ongoing series From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate is some of the best writing ever about or as jazz, by being written as jazz. His critical essays offer us all profound tools for understanding formal experimentation in poetry, literature and music and how they address the problems and paradoxes of social life. He’s an encyclopaedic jazz and world music radio DJ, and editor of hugely influential collections of poetry. He’s probably your favourite poet’s favourite poet.

“Mackey has now written close to one thousand pages of fiction about music that does not exist….What is so revolutionary about it, still, is the way Mackey makes the pain of this absence into the occasion for renewing a love of language, of redirecting our ears toward the page…[His] handling of history is subtle and immaculate.” — BOMB Magazine

“Our greatest living epic poet…Mackey’s poetry and criticism…have reinvented modernism for our time.” — LitHub

“Mackey composes realist-mythic layering of lyrical prose unlike anything being written today.” — New York Time

Thanks to The University of Arizona Poetry Center for the use of the photograph.

Image Description: Nate is shown from the waist up, leaning against a fence that forms the right-hand side of the image. He wears a dark blue t-shirt and metal rimmed glasses. His arms are folded. On his left wrist is a black strapped watch, and what looks like a leather bracelet or hair band. He has a grey short beard on his chin, but no moustache. His hair is in thin dreads, swept back from his face, reaching down past his neck and resting on the collar of his T-shirt. He’s looking at the camera.