"I'm Always so Serious is brilliant." --Terrance Hayes, winner of the National Book Award for Lighthead Karisma Price's stunning debut collection is an extendedmeditation on Blackness, on family, on loss. Anchored in New Orleans and NewYork City, these poems braid personal and public histories into a culturalreckoning of past and present. James Booker speaks to Ringo Starr, a phone "Autocorrects'Nigga' to Night, '" If Beale StreetCould Talk is recast with characters from The Odyssey. In these pages there is grief, there is absence, thereis violence--"Weknow that mostly everything around us / is measured in blood."--but there isalso immense love and truth. Karisma Price has created a serious masterpiece, abook "so dark you have no other option but to call it / precious."