Randall James Tyrone's debut collection City of Dis is a searing exploration of contemporary existence intertwined with medieval notions of damnation, invoking Dante's "Inferno" to craft a modern-day epic. Doubling as a novel-in-verse, City of Dis follows the unnamed protagonist as they navigate a cityscape that is both a circle of hell and also the urban sprawl of 21st-century America. Amidst the cacophony of sirens, construction, and hurricanes fueled by climate change, Tyrone weaves a tapestry where pop culture, late-stage capitalism, and the daily struggles imposed by inequities of race and class in this urban inferno collide with arcane theology, existential dread, and something like divine comedy. Through forms ranging from epistolary to litany, Tyrone's speaker charts every chaotic inch of this dystopian landscape, encountering Dante himself as they confront the personification of Suicide. City of Dis stands not only as a vivid critique of modern society but also as a haunting testament to resilience in the face of spiritual and environmental decay.
Randall James Tyrone holds an MFA from the University of Wyoming. He resides in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in Electric Literature's Okey-Panky, Oversound Poetry, and Nomadic Press. He has been anthologized in the Bodies Built For A Game Anthology by Prairie Schooner. He has received a scholarship to attend the Tin House Summer Workshop and was awarded the Bentley-Buckman Poetry Fellowship to attend the Writers Week at the Idyllwild Arts Foundation. He was a finalist for the Indiana Review's 1/2 K Prize and a finalist for The X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. He's very excited for you.
"Reginald Shepherd called us out twenty years ago: we're all urban now, but we've been stuck in a rural poetics, 'still struggling toward a poetic language of the city.' Until now. Randall Tyrone just invented that language. Tyrone's city is mythical and abyssal and oracular and real. It is where we live, and who we are. City of Dis is not a place of 'my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils'; it is a place of 'Tell me pushpin cubical tapestry / who do I work for,' packed here 'like gunpowder / in a suicidal chamber.' Welcome to the City of Dis. We're not in the Lake District anymore." - H. L. Hix, author of American Outrage "Tyrone's City of Dis interrupts the conversation about what a poem should do, about what a poem is capable of today, if anything at all. With urgency and the courage to experiment with the tradition and make his moment wholly his own, Tyrone makes you stand up and take inventory of what you've done and hold yourself accountable for forgetting what poetry can do." - Joshua Robbins, author of Eschatology in Crayon Wax
