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When My Body Was A Clinched Fist (July 2020, Black Lawrence Press)

Praise for When My Body Was A Clinched Fist

“In Enzo Silon Surin’s stellar debut, we find a child cornered on corners, elegy distilled from eulogy, unnerving music after a certain numbness, fury after pain. Everywhere there is the evidence of a body done wrong: poverty mounts on violence, shaping the hand into a fist ready to strike. Yet this book is also profoundly lyrical, sensitive, and altogether loving. Surin’s eloquence deserves recognition: these poems are exquisitely crafted. Moreover, When My Body Was A Clinched Fist is a deeply important contribution to our national conversation about gun violence.” —Cate Marvin, author of Oracle

“In this full-length debut, Enzo Silon Surin traverses the turns of coming of age in the New York of the 1990s. In these sonically-packed stanzas, Surin draws scenes where hip hop and Haiti flow through the borough of Queens. He elegizes a friend named Frankie, and interrogates how masculinity is so often flexed like the knuckles of an ever-ready fist, even when vulnerability pulses underneath.” —Tara Betts, author of Break the Habit

“When My Body Was A Clinched Fist is born out of ultimate pain. Enzo Silon Surin weaves his words, like he weaves through trauma, with vulnerability, grace, and radical resilience. His writing is clearly an intrapsychic reckoning, with wounds and scars deeper than anyone ever wants to ever fathom, and too, a love song to finding home again within one’s mind, body, and brain. The reader is gifted with this journey, which is a redemptive one at its core.” —Jennifer R. Wolkin, PhD, Licensed Psychologist & Clinical Neuropsychologist

“Back in the day when KRS-One intoned—The Bridge is over!—he did not prefigure a poet from Queens of the fierce attitude and intellectual magnitude of Enzo Silon Surin. When My Body Was A Clinched Fist gives the Heisman to such a refrain with lyrical power-packing poetics that settles the score with a succinct—Not! No the Bridge is not over, for Surin’s Queens is alive and well and under the gaze of a master observer who eulogizes lives that though at times are battered have always mattered. Enzo Silon Surin’s poems get you caught up in the deeply personal experiences of growing and visceral all-encompassing knowing from an acute witness of every breath and follicle of Black life from palm trees, sand and sea to street corner projects, suburban houses and fistfuls of black water. Surin writes about the confused and disconnected, trigger happy wannabes trapped by outdated notions of masculinity, the cracked head crackheads all held in the clutch of society’s clinched fist through which the trauma that comes with being of color, addicted, broke, lost and tossed, is itself a clinched fist of black bodies caught in the Russian nesting doll America’s clinched fists make. When MyBody Was A Clinched Fist is an elegy for “the premature exits.” It is a blues for the black-on-black black and blue. Surin yields his pen like a microscopic scalpel whereby an autopsy of possibility is performed to un-clinch the remarkable bone gristle poetry in these unflinching heart-wrenching pages.” —Tony Medina, author of Death with Occasional Smiling and I Am Alfonso Jones

“When My Body Was A Clinched Fist emerges as a significant marker in the reimagining of African American culture. Enzo Silon Surin’s poetry brings an honest lyricism to the body of work by people of African descent that began in the eighteenth century in a country that struggles to realize its ideals. His delicate unveiling of hurt and courage are the American story in miniature. A young boy from Haiti leaves the dangers of home to confront the unknown dangers of a new home. Surin is the poet as warrior priest, his work the prophet’s homily redefining what it means to become and be an American.” —Afaa Michael Weaver, author of Spirit Boxing

A Letter of Resignation: An American Libretto (chapbook, 2017)

Praise for A Letter of Resignation

“In A Letter of Resignation, Enzo Silon Surin has crafted a poetic composition that laments both the historic and contemporary ‘matterless’ nature of black lives in America. It is a masterpiece. Much like James Baldwin before him, Surin’s gripping work is equal parts a catalog of black suffering and a bold declaration of independence from the tyranny of racism. In a time in the United States when injustice is a bully with a Goliath-like roar, Surin answers back with poetic stones of resistance. That act of courage is nothing to take lightly. Neither is this superbly written book.” —Truth Thomas, author of Speak Water

“Inspired by such heroic voices as Martinique’s Aimé Césaire, Enzo Silon Surin brings his Haitian roots to bear on the landscape of America in an epic sweep of incantatory rhythms evoking the enduring spirit of the African Diaspora. The immediacy of his poetry is grounded in his sense of history, as twenty-first century black immigrants come to the U.S. to negotiate race and culture. They are the new African Americans whose histories now meet that of the first African Americans in a hybridity that goes unarticulated until we see this kind of poetry. A Letter of Resignation is a remarkable feat.” —Afaa Michael Weaver, author of Spirit Boxing

The Next Verse Poets Mixtape - Volume One: the 4X4 (2016)

featuring: Melanie Henderson, Fred Joiner, Lisa Pegram, & Enzo Silon Surin