Read "A Guitar Player Is Born" from the forthcoming chapbook collaboration SLASH / SLASH (June '21).
The collaboratively written poems in the chapbook Slash / Slash explore identity, masculinity, fame, and music. Partly a mythologized biography of heavy metal guitarist Slash, partly a fictionalized story of the complex relationship between Slash and his longtime bandmate Axl Rose, these poems dive into unanswerable questions. What does it mean to be larger than life? What matters more: the music you make or whether someone is listening? What is the difference between who you are and who you become?
Amorak Huey’s fourth book of poems is Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) and the chapbook Slash / Slash (Diode Editions, 2021), Huey teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Columbia Review, The Southern Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, and many other print and online journals.
W. Todd Kaneko is the author of the poetry books This is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence Press 2020) and The Dead Wrestler Elegies (New Michigan Press 2020). He is co-author with Amorak Huey of Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2018), and Slash / Slash, winner of the 2020 Diode Editions Chapbook Prize, which will be published in 2021. A Kundiman Fellow, he teaches at Grand Valley State University and lives with his family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
