semiautomatic

Evie Shockley’s collection takes up race, surveillance, police violence, and Black life in America with formal invention and intellectual sharpness. The title itself suggests both weaponry and repetition, and the poems explore that duality with devastating precision. Shockley experiments widely, drawing on visual arrangement, inherited forms, and contemporary speech. Her poems are politically charged without ever feeling programmatic. Instead, they remain alive to complexity, contradiction, and music. The collection pays close attention to language as a site of control and resistance. Shockley is particularly strong at showing how violence becomes normalized through rhetoric and media. Yet there is also wit, beauty, and tenderness in these poems. They ask readers not only to witness but to think harder. An innovative, urgent collection that feels fully of its moment and beyond it.