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With unapologetic honesty and characteristic lyric beauty, G. Winston James takes us on a journey through the forest of his mind. The Damaged Good is a precious, if at times unsettling, work exploring the author’s life as a Caribbean immigrant raised on secrets, engulfed by sex in New York City’s gay subculture, and nearly destroyed by his own fictions. This brave collection explores the loss of promise and of faith, the breaking of will, laws and of a mind. It is a reflection on the gravity of living, of death, and of the search for love. The Damaged Good offers us the opportunity to witness how low we must sometimes go in order to find ourselves and be saved.
“The Damaged Good is a tale of new times in our history delivered with the intentionality and intensity of writers like Nikki Giovanni and Essex Hemphill. This collection is made of stuff the Dewey Decimal System was created to find.”
Borris Powell, Activist/Educator
Gay Men of African Descent, Inc.
“What an awesome read! At times painful/upsetting. Brilliant!! Stark, raw, lusty, dangerous and intimate, G. Winston James gives us a gift. These poems fall like gems breaking away from the sky. This is our gift: to stare self in the unflinching mirror of truth, and fight back as if our lives depended on it.”
Cheryl Boyce Taylor, Author
Convincing the Body (Vintage Entity Press)
“Do not wonder where this poet has been. A growing season has surely covered the broken road of him. What bruise and scar left by the scratch and slap of his poems have surely been healed by their inspired stroke. Wonder instead if it is your name that appears in his ash, after the poet has washed his hands of you. Wonder if his pinky swear to your secret will hold. Wonder if your finger to his lips/his lisp will silence his fears. It is dangerous for a poet to have loved so much and to have remembered it all. Wonder what names, what dead will the paper cut of The Damaged Good bleed.”
Marvin K. White, Author
Last Rights and Nothin’ Ugly Fly (Redbone Press)