Wires That Sputter

Poems

By: Britta Badour

Narrated by: Britta Badour

Length: 1 hr and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

A powerful debut collection from an award-winning artist, public speaker, and poet.

With propulsive, intimate stylings and an eye toward Black liberations, pop culture, sports, and familial fractures, Wires that Sputter meets the world with the posture of a portraitist and the deftness of a poet-as-acrobat, as seeker. Here in these wondrous poems is an attentiveness toward that which harrows as well as that which heals, toward the power of space-giving and fragmentation. Rupture and recovery, tribute and tribulation, a revivifying musicality, and room to breathe—all dapple this book, where electricity manifests in every line.

©2023 Britta Badour (P)2023 McClelland & Stewart

Critic reviews

“Wires that Sputter delivers on the promised electricity with syntax that flashes like lightning and interrupts like good thunder. Through Britta Badour’s words runs a language as shocking and new as what Franklin found when he casted that key into the sky. An inventor in her own right, Badour’s debut buzzes with the freeness of jazz and the attitude of a boombox.” —Danez Smith, author of Homie

“In Wires that Sputter Britta Badour proves herself to be a poet unafraid to risk, unafraid to push the english language to its buoyant, confounding and sonically pleasurable limits. These poems testify to Britta’s faith in poetry as a mechanism for expansiveness, where the tensions between the spoken and unspoken, the revealed truth and the concealed (family) secret are exquisite, daring and capacious.” —Brandon Wint, author of Divine Animal

“Britta Badour uses the page as a canvas, sheet music. Poems that feel like songs. The collection invites readers to dance, light fires, and unlock the homes we are made of.” —Ian Keteku, former World Poetry Slam champion and author of Black Abacus