" 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 extended meditation on Blackness, on family, on loss. Anchored in New Orleans and New York City, these poems braid personal and public histories into a cultural reckoning of past and present. James Booker speaks to Ringo Starr, a phone “Autocorrects ‘Nigga’ to Night,'” If Beale Street Could Talk is recast with characters from The Odyssey. In these pages there is grief, there is absence, there is violence—“We know that mostly everything around us / is measured in blood.”—but there is also immense love and truth. Karisma Price has created a serious masterpiece, a book “so dark you have no other option but to call it / precious.” The New York Times Book Review,  "Editors' Choice" The New York Times Book Review,  "9 New Books We Recommend This Week" The New York Times Book Review,  "From Newcomers and Veterans, Four New Poetry Books Worth Your Time" Library Journal , "Black History Month: 10 Books To Add to the Collection and Share with Readers" Library Journal , "Celebrate National Poetry Month" Featured on "The Slowdown Show" with Major Jackson Ms. Magazine,  "The Best Poetry of the Last Year" The Poetry Question , "TPQ Best Poetry Collections of 2023" Southern Review of Books , "The Best Southern Books of February 2023” Brown Girl Collective Book Club, "Favorite Poetry Books" "Karisma Price’s debut poetry collection,  I'm Always so Serious , has set New Orleans buzzing with the deftness of her vision and her attention to the kind of details that show the city in a fresh way." —Maurice Carlos Ruffin,  The New York Times   "[R]ich with aphorism and rhetoric. . . .Starting and ending in her native New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, spanning many generations and stories, and folding in several spiky, multi-page forms, Karisma Price turns her first book. . . into an exciting start for what might be a stellar career." —Stephanie Burt for The New York Times Book Review "[C]an we recommend Karisma Price’s debut collection, I’m Always so Serious ? To poetry lovers her title might seem to evoke Christian Wiman’s marvelous epic Being Serious (also worth reading!), but Price is very much staking her own ground here, on Southern soil blessed and haunted by the ghosts of forebears; her book summons everyone from James Baldwin to Gwendolyn Brooks to Beyoncé. I think you’ll like it." —Gregory Cowles for The New York Times Book Review , "Editors' Choice" "This formally innovative collection rewards readers with its memorable and incisive reflections.” — Publishers Weekly "In a distinctive debut illuminating Black life in the United States, Price offers a startling number of taut, to-the-point aperçus, working not so much by lyrical turn as by the captured moment, the homed-in-on truth of 'overworked fathers and damaged mothers,' the 'commonwealth of hooded children,' the murdered, the enslaved whose burial sites are unknown, the 'bodies [that] have been thrown away.'. . .An assured debut from a writer to watch." — Library Journal , "Celebrate National Poetry Month" "Karisma Price’s debut, I’m Always so Serious , is an address to and through various beloveds." —Harriet Books through Poetry Foundation "Lyrical, ample, beloved." — Ms. Magazine , "The Best Poetry of the Last Year" "The book is a tender but powerful thing, something you want to cradle and not drop." —Christopher Louis Romaguera for Ploughshares "To put it simply, Price offers a collection that should be in the running for every poetry award available this year. She writes with incredible precision, yet every poem feels impossibly natural, almost inevitable, as though the words were only ever meant to exist exactly as Price arranges them. I’m Always So Serious is among the best debuts in American poetry, and Price has established herself as one of the most preeminent voices of her generation." — The Poetry Question "Incredible. . . . I see myself returning to this touching book again and again." —Connie Pan for Book Riot , "Poetry Books for Nonfiction Lovers" " I’m Always So Serious , a three-part exploration of Blackness, community, public and private history—dazzles with its smart lists and carefully crafted personas." —Diamond Forde, Honey Literary "Such a vivid, sui generis project!" —Julie Marie Wade, Tupelo Quarterly " I’m Always so Serious is a collection that will stun you, that will haunt you, that will leave you in tears but also with the courage to move on, with the knowledge that the poet cares that 'you are cared for.'" —Tiffany Troy, Tupelo Quarterly "Karisma Price speaks with a wink, a sigh, a knitted brow when she says she’s always so serious. She speaks as someone raised on a gumbo of James Baldwin and James Booker, Buckjumping and Brooklyn. She speaks as your phone’s autocorrect, your remixed song lyrics, your friendly neighborhood fortune teller. Price speaks directly