Ugly Duckling Presse To Publish 'Palm-Lined With Potience' by Basie Allen '19

Palm-Lined With Potience by Alumnus Basie Allen '19 will be published by Ugly Duckling Presse on March 15, 2022. The collection is now available for pre-order.

Palm-Lined With Potience is Allen's debut collection of poems. As both a visual artist and a poet, Allen's work makes maps of paintings and paintings of maps. The work is by turns political and lyrical, and charts both physical and emotional landscapes. According to Ugly Duckling, "while rooted in Pro-Black theory, art, and precise description, Basie makes space in the ekphrastic for the eerie and abstract. The poems in this collection search for nodes of truth in a tumultuous sea of fractured facts."

Author Terrance Hayes writes, "Allen is a true new New York School Poet. Or better: a BKNY School Poet raised on the Popeyes on Atlantic Avenue, DMX subway elegies, Rocawear, Baudelaire, and 'Cy Twomblylylylylylyly shadows.' This poet handles language like a painter. This poet handles language as Richard Pryor would have if he’d made his living writing poems. Palm-Lined with Potience is amazing. I truly have rarely encountered such a singular debut. Basie Allen is the truth."

Artist Alex Tatarsky also praised the collection, saying, "The power of Allen's descriptive phrases is in their precision, a sense of commitment to contour, internal curvature…These verses both welcome and wrestle with a Black poetics in all the many realms it inhabits and dislocates, cityscape as nature poem. Feelingscape as nature poem. Concrete poetry with an intimate understanding of concrete, the lifetime study of being a city kid. Transported, transportive tongues of verse.

Allen is a poet and visual artist from New York City’s Lower East Side. His work carves parentheses in-between dirt and feeling. In 2020 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His poem “Psychic Cartography” is included in MoMA/P.S.1’s Homeroom series of online publications.