Publications
Books, Poems, Essays, Interviews, Podcasts and more
American Scapegoat - Available Now
(2023)
American Scapegoat is a book of painstakingly honest and chilling poems about America’s neglectful relationship with its own history. At the core of this reluctance to frame the past in its proper context is the fraudulent and fraught mythology that Black people are what America needs to be protected from. This extremely damaging narrative has been prominently embedded within the socio-political framework of American culture and continues to play an inescapably significant role in the Black experience in America. This timely collection looks both to the past and the future, and fosters a deeply essential conversation about what it means to be Black and American in a democracy at war with itself and its humanity.
Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience
(2022)
"This anthology is the official answer for how we/us survived the apex of multiple pandemics. With recipes for survival like Tara Betts’ “Stay Lit” and ol’ school incantations illuminating truths like Kenneth Carroll’s “This Muvfucka,” we marry ourselves to the future, without ever once forgetting what Lisa Pegram says, “Even a sponge has a saturation point.” Part declaration of not dependent, part sacred text, this collection is both who we are and how we shall continue to be—all in the same breath."
- Frank X. Walker, author of Masked Man, Black: Pandemic & Protest Poems and Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers.
Order from Cherry Castle Publishing
When My Body Was A Clinched Fist
(July 2020, Black Lawrence Press)
Winner of the 21st Annual Massachusetts Book Award
WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST is a book that addresses the effects of social violence on a young boy’s mind and the consequent physical toll it takes on his body. At the heart of the collection is the metamorphosis of trauma from different acts of violence, some witnessed firsthand, and the struggle to make sense of the world in its aftermath. Set in the borough of Queens, New York, each poem is unrelenting in its depiction of the body as a fist and a young boy’s decade-long clinch for survival.
Order from » BLACK LAWRENCE PRESS
or your local indie bookstore or preferred online retailer.
A Letter of Resignation: An American Libretto
(chapbook, 2017)
A Letter of Resignation is a meditation on American history informed by the Black experience in the United States and neighboring island republics. This musically-infused libretto is addressed to History as a Republic, in which certain moments and individuals have been vetted and elected to convey a message that consistently denigrates more than it celebrates what it is to be American Black. Part Blues, part Jazz, part Hip-Hop, this book-length poem is a sound declaration from a tired, fed-up generation.
Order today from Central Square Press
The Next Verse Poets Mixtape - Volume One: the 4X4
(2016)
featuring: Melanie Henderson, Fred Joiner, Lisa Pegram & Enzo Silon Surin
THE NEXT VERSE POETS MIXTAPE is a poetry sampler of ethnographic significance. 4 poets represented by 4 poems each offer insight into the shared experiences of black Americans in today’s political and social climate. Poems such as “Notes to a Little Black Boy”, “Seven Ways of Looking at Black Flowers”, and “How to Nullify a Super Hero” speak loudly about negotiating the delicate promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In addition, poems like “Lamb & Vodka”, “Drum Lesson”, “Nostalgia”, and “Once, When We Were Not Gods” highlight place and its lingering presence in our beings in ways that are akin to us all. These poems, both layered and plain, coax reverence as each poet explores the intricacies of the familiar.
Order from Central Square Press or Amazon.com
"Enzo Silon Surin's poetry brings an honest lyricism to the body of work by people of African descent that began in the eighteenth century in a country that struggles to realize its ideals. Inspired by such heroic voices as Martinique’s Aimé Césaire, Surin brings his Haitian roots to bear on the landscape of America in an epic sweep of incantatory rhythms evoking the enduring spirit of the African Diaspora. The immediacy of his poetry is grounded in his sense of history, as twenty-first century black immigrants come to the U.S. to negotiate race and culture. His delicate unveiling of hurt and courage are the American story in miniature. He is the poet as warrior priest, his work the prophet's homily redefining what it means to become and be an American.”
—AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER, Author of A Fire in the Hills
Recent Awards::
The New England Poetry Club is pleased to announce the recipients of its Grants for Individual Poetic Achievement: Sarah Audsley and Enzo Silon Surin.
Swampscott poet wins Mass. Book Award - The Salem News
“Enzo Silon Surin has crafted a poetic composition that laments both the historic and contemporary ‘matterless’ nature of black lives in America. It is a masterpiece. Much like James Baldwin before him, Surin’s gripping work is equal parts a catalog of black suffering and a bold declaration of independence from the tyranny of racism. In a time in the United States when injustice is a bully with a Goliath-like roar, Surin answers back with poetic stones of resistance."
—TRUTH THOMAS, Author of Speak Water, winner of the NAACP Award
QUEENSBOUND is a collaborative poetry project by, for, and about Queens.
Black Writers Read Podcast S3 E13: Enzo Silon Surin
BCLF Festival 2023: Laureates of the Caribbean
Black Writers Read
WGBH: Worldwide Week With Transition Magazine
Mass Poets read "In this Place (An American Lyric)" by Amanda Gorman
When My Body Was A Clinched Fist (Massachusetts Poetry Festival Small Booth Fair)
“Back in the day when KRS-One intoned—The Bridge is over!—he did not prefigure a poet from Queens of the fierce attitude and intellectual magnitude of Enzo Silon Surin. When My Body Was A Clinched Fist gives the Heisman to such a refrain with lyrical power-packing poetics that settles the score with a succinct—Not! No the Bridge is not over, for Surin’s Queens is alive and well and under the gaze of a master observer who eulogizes lives that though at times are battered have always mattered. Enzo Silon Surin’s poems get you caught up in the deeply personal experiences of growing and visceral all-encompassing knowing from an acute witness of every breath and follicle of Black life from palm trees, sand and sea to street corner projects, suburban houses and fistfuls of black water. Surin writes about the confused and disconnected, trigger happy wannabes trapped by outdated notions of masculinity, the cracked head crackheads all held in the clutch of society’s clinched fist through which the trauma that comes with being of color, addicted, broke, lost and tossed, is itself a clinched fist of black bodies caught in the Russian nesting doll America’s clinched fists make. When MyBody Was A Clinched Fist is an elegy for “the premature exits.” It is a blues for the black-on-black black and blue. Surin yields his pen like a microscopic scalpel whereby an autopsy of possibility is performed to un-clinch the remarkable bone gristle poetry in these unflinching heart-wrenching pages.” —Tony Medina, author of Death with Occasional Smiling and I Am Alfonso Jones
“In Enzo Silon Surin’s stellar debut, we find a child cornered on corners, elegy distilled from eulogy, unnerving music after a certain numbness, fury after pain. Everywhere there is the evidence of a body done wrong: poverty mounts on violence, shaping the hand into a fist ready to strike. Yet this book is also profoundly lyrical, sensitive, and altogether loving. Surin’s eloquence deserves recognition: these poems are exquisitely crafted. Moreover, When My Body Was A Clinched Fist is a deeply important contribution to our national conversation about gun violence.” —Cate Marvin, author of Oracle
“In this full-length debut, Enzo Silon Surin traverses the turns of coming of age in the New York of the 1990s. In these sonically-packed stanzas, Surin draws scenes where hip hop and Haiti flow through the borough of Queens. He elegizes a friend named Frankie, and interrogates how masculinity is so often flexed like the knuckles of an ever-ready fist, even when vulnerability pulses underneath.” —Tara Betts, author of Break the Habit
“When My Body Was A Clinched Fist is born out of ultimate pain. Enzo Silon Surin weaves his words, like he weaves through trauma, with vulnerability, grace, and radical resilience. His writing is clearly an intrapsychic reckoning, with wounds and scars deeper than anyone ever wants to ever fathom, and too, a love song to finding home again within one’s mind, body, and brain. The reader is gifted with this journey, which is a redemptive one at its core.” —Jennifer R. Wolkin, PhD, Licensed Psychologist & Clinical Neuropsychologist
“When My Body Was A Clinched Fist emerges as a significant marker in the reimagining of African American culture. Enzo Silon Surin’s poetry brings an honest lyricism to the body of work by people of African descent that began in the eighteenth century in a country that struggles to realize its ideals. His delicate unveiling of hurt and courage are the American story in miniature. A young boy from Haiti leaves the dangers of home to confront the unknown dangers of a new home. Surin is the poet as warrior priest, his work the prophet’s homily redefining what it means to become and be an American.” —Afaa Michael Weaver, author of Spirit Boxing
“In America, choice is always an illusion. And it always comes back to having to answer questions for which my body is never prepared.
Through his own distinctive path, Enzo Silon Surin bears witness to the complexities of the Black experience in America. These poems examine the hard edges and paradoxes as a way of illuminating them as he grapples with violence, injustice, masculinity, intimacy, and fatherhood. How does one locate themselves in this American landscape? American Scapegoat is a remarkable testament to the power of language, marked with intensity, radiance, and hope.”—January Gill O’Neil
“The poems in American Scapegoat are not for the faint of heart. Wrapped masterfully in poetry’s artful tongue, they do not seek absolution nor do they apologize as the collection indicts American racism and its bloated, systemic injustices. Heightening the reader’s experience with a surgically precise interrogation of form in poems like “American Lexicon,” “Prelude,” and “American Witness,” Enzo Silon Surin writes against our fears and shines bright the hope we dare have for our sons.” —Frank X Walker
Poetry Readings
Surin's work is the recipient of several poetry prizes and has been described as "powerful, compelling"; "bold, necessary" and "poetry that matters."
Speaking Engagements
Surin is passionate about building up individuals in order that they can achieve their life purpose. He has been a featured keynote at colleges & universities, literary festivals, and more.
Writing Workshops
Whether working with youth and community organizations, the incarcerated, or in higher education classrooms, Surin's poetry workshops help to develop and hone skills at any level of experience.