Intimate and searching.
—The New York Times Book Review
Raymond Antrobus’s compelling debut, The Perseverance, confronts deeply rooted prejudice against deaf people.
—The Guardian
Remarkable. Antrobus, who was born deaf, writes about grief, race and violence in lines that are startlingly immediate and provocative.—The Washington Post
The Perseverance relates Antrobus’s experiences of being biracial and d/Deaf in sharp and beautiful poems. . . . These poems are expressive and beautiful and will leave readers thinking differently about sound and silence.
—BuzzFeed
Stunning.—New York Public Library
Antrobus can be gentle, tactile, and pointed in this book—which collects into an affirmation, a pronouncement.—The Millions
Outstanding.—Chicago Review of Books
Emotionally textured and sonically charged. . . . the poem [‘Sound Machine’] gyrates through interrogations of grief and ancestry twinned with a brooded meditation on masculinity and selfhood.—Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
This book is a gift, for how it repurposes my understanding of treacherous feelings, and shapes them into something worth sticking around for.—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Fortune For Your Disaster
The Perseverance is an insightful, frank and intimate rumination on language, identity, heritage, loss and the art of communication. . . . These are courageous autobiographical poems of praise, difficulties, testimony and love.
—Malika Booker, author of Pepper Seed
Honest, raw and striking. . . . Antrobus captures the feeling of isolation that comes with navigating a world not made for everyone who exists within it.—Arkansas International
Clear, unflinching. . . . We expand our comprehension of humanness in encountering these poems, and recognize the limits of language that is only spoken and heard—The Perseverance is language embodied and utterly present.
—Orion Magazine, Khadijah Queen Recommends
An extraordinary debut.—Entropy Magazine, Best Poetry Books of 2020 – 2021
An affecting, accessible, and astonishingly raw collection of poems.—October Hill Magazine
A memorable collection. . . . Antrobus interlaces wit and pathos as he examines his identity as a deaf British Jamaican man in a world between sign language and speech.—The Sunday Times
Insightful.—Cool Hunting
A poet who traverses a diversity of worlds.—Colorlines
At every turn, Antrobus pushes back against flattening, against the tidy narrative—an invidious Ted Hughes poem gets radically revised, an aunt’s misheard utterance becomes ‘a faint fog horn, a lost river.’ It’s magic, the way this poet is able to bring together so much—deafness, race, masculinity, a mother’s dementia, a father’s demise—with such dexterity.—Kaveh Akbar
It channels Danez Smith, Malika Booker and Caroline Bird, in formal poems, erasures, free verse, innovative use of Makaton symbols, translation, prose, and a blackout version of Ted Hughes’ ‘Deaf School’; probably the best poem I read all year, and it doesn’t even have any words in it.—Will Barrett, Poetry School
Antrobus’s evocative, musical honesty is unforgettable.—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Innovative and urgent. . . . Deserves a wide readership.—BookPage
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