Elementary Secondary Higher Ed Common Reads
0 0
Download high-resolution image

Promise/Threat

Poems

Author Jonah Mixon-Webster
Audiobook Download
Audio | Random House Audio
On sale Mar 10, 2026 | 2 Hours and 0 Minutes | 9798217174256
Add to cart Add to list Exam Copies

See Additional Formats
After storming the scene with Stereo(TYPE), the PEN America Award–winning poet makes his highly anticipated return—with a virtuosic sophomore collection that plunges the reader into the tenebrous realm between dreams and reality, and firmly establishes him as an essential voice in American poetry

“I’m coming to you live,” Jonah Mixon-Webster announces early on in Promise/Threat, “from the corner of Shit Blvd. and Out O’ Luck St. / with my monkey paws.” So begins a three-part journey of a troubled rebirth, one that ushers the reader through all the torment of a Dantean comedy as it climbs unsteadily from darkness to light, navigating an internalized landscape that evokes the Flint, Michigan of the poet’s youth.

In the long central sequence, “Territory,” Mixon-Webster sets the reader in a mirror hall of dreams, where one’s nemesis (or one’s self) is always lurking around the corner. Violences of the waking life—“the real and various guns pulled on me”—trickle into the narrator’s sleep, as he flees from vision to vision, “picking the fruit in one dream and eating it in the next.” And though the poet begins to wake in the book’s third and final section, he’s still running from the “body snatchers / in uniform.” Mixon-Webster’s musings turn to love, and the often destructive desires it provokes in us, as he grapples with how to carry the burden of a past that threatens to sabotage your future.

These are seeking, supple poems, whose forms adapt to contain their transfigured images. What emerges in this daring second collection is a surreal and haunting portrait of life in modern America, where pitfalls hide in every promise.
© Aslan Chalom
JONAH MIXON-WEBSTER is a poet and conceptual/sound artist from Flint, Michigan. Stereo(TYPE) is his debut collection of poems. It was originally published by Ahsahta Press in 2018 and won the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. He graduated from Eastern Michigan University and received a Ph.D. in creative writing from Illinois State University. He is the recipient of the Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, the Conversation Literary Festival, and the PEN Writing for Justice Program. His poetry and hybrid works are featured in various publications including The Yale Review, Callaloo, The Rumpus, Harper’s Magazine, Best New Poets 2017, and Best American Experimental Writing 2018.  View titles by Jonah Mixon-Webster

About

After storming the scene with Stereo(TYPE), the PEN America Award–winning poet makes his highly anticipated return—with a virtuosic sophomore collection that plunges the reader into the tenebrous realm between dreams and reality, and firmly establishes him as an essential voice in American poetry

“I’m coming to you live,” Jonah Mixon-Webster announces early on in Promise/Threat, “from the corner of Shit Blvd. and Out O’ Luck St. / with my monkey paws.” So begins a three-part journey of a troubled rebirth, one that ushers the reader through all the torment of a Dantean comedy as it climbs unsteadily from darkness to light, navigating an internalized landscape that evokes the Flint, Michigan of the poet’s youth.

In the long central sequence, “Territory,” Mixon-Webster sets the reader in a mirror hall of dreams, where one’s nemesis (or one’s self) is always lurking around the corner. Violences of the waking life—“the real and various guns pulled on me”—trickle into the narrator’s sleep, as he flees from vision to vision, “picking the fruit in one dream and eating it in the next.” And though the poet begins to wake in the book’s third and final section, he’s still running from the “body snatchers / in uniform.” Mixon-Webster’s musings turn to love, and the often destructive desires it provokes in us, as he grapples with how to carry the burden of a past that threatens to sabotage your future.

These are seeking, supple poems, whose forms adapt to contain their transfigured images. What emerges in this daring second collection is a surreal and haunting portrait of life in modern America, where pitfalls hide in every promise.

Author

© Aslan Chalom
JONAH MIXON-WEBSTER is a poet and conceptual/sound artist from Flint, Michigan. Stereo(TYPE) is his debut collection of poems. It was originally published by Ahsahta Press in 2018 and won the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. He graduated from Eastern Michigan University and received a Ph.D. in creative writing from Illinois State University. He is the recipient of the Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, the Conversation Literary Festival, and the PEN Writing for Justice Program. His poetry and hybrid works are featured in various publications including The Yale Review, Callaloo, The Rumpus, Harper’s Magazine, Best New Poets 2017, and Best American Experimental Writing 2018.  View titles by Jonah Mixon-Webster

Additional formats

Other Books by this Author

Related Articles

Subscribe

Penguin Random House Higher Education

© 2025 Penguin Random House

Back to Top
0
    • 0
    Wish List (0)