dying in the scarecrow’s arms
Mitchell L.H. Douglas

In urgent new poems, Mitchell L. H. Douglas depicts the assault on people of color in America’s increasingly divided Heartland. A devotee of American popular culture, from rock ’n’ roll to Star Wars to Marvel comic books, Douglas now wonders whether we will withstand its most odious, self-destructive elements in this searing collection.

“In his third book Mitchell L. H. Douglas delivers a lyric bildungsroman, a hymnal of manhood, eerily guided from page one by Etheridge Knight, who, like Douglas, lived a full life at the cursed cross of Kentucky or Indiana, enslavement or liberation, incarceration or career. What does it mean to make love, grocery shop, make it home, each night, safe? dying in the scarecrow’s arms is our needed testament of black life mattering, of a man owning his own, because, by God, he can.”
—Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory

“Douglas sing[s] of America in all its vice and virtue.” —Publishers Weekly

Mitchell L. H. Douglas is the author of three poetry collections including /blak/ /al-fə bet/. A native of Louisville, he lives in Indianapolis. 

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-089255-487-4 / 82 pages / Poetry

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