Summertime Fine Jason B Crawford's debut chapbook, Summertime Fine, winner of the 2020 Variant Literature chapbook contest.
The poems in Summertime Fine are built to live on the tongue. Full of block parties and Slurpee machines, cayenne and ribs—“like everyone’s daddy pulled one out they chest and slapped barbecue sauce on it”—the collection reminds us that what we taste, what we savor, we consume. “See, that was my childhood, understanding everything would be temporary,” it says, refusing elegy but unable to forget the exuberance of summers past, the joy in the alleys of American dread. By turns playful and deadly serious, Summertime Fine sniffs at immortality even as it recognizes how the body will betray us, or will be made to betray us, revealing “I don’t trust my own / blood either / That it won’t leave me if they / decide I am a building worth / opening.” —Ross White, Author of How We Came Upon the Colony and The Polite Society
