Loved this collection! I really enjoyed Antrobus's first collection and anticipated liking this collection as well. This collection seemed very personal. There are a lot of poems about family and identity. I enjoyed this and have recommended it to friends!

Poet Raymond Antrobus stunned the literary world with his debut, The Perseverance, which won the Rathbones Folio Prize. His second collection, All the Names Given, proves the depth and clarity of his voice as it draws upon the complicated history of his surname and the interrelation of sound and silence, mingling the tangible with the transparent.

In these poems, Antrobus cross-pollinates time and space, each poem reminding readers of the ways a human can, in fact, be two things at once: here and there; now and then; fluent in the formal and the fractured musicality of language. Inspired by the work of Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim, Antrobus (also Deaf) interjects [Caption Poems] throughout, reframing closed captioning as a creative act, each description providing layers of unexpected complexity, such as "[sound of something left out]" or "[sound of mirror refusing reflection]."

Whether confronting the raw truth of new love or shared pain, Antrobus creates unforgettable images, simultaneously searing and tender, as in "For Cousin John": "I prepare silence,/ practise each time for a calm dinner/ but you lift a fork, unsettle the territory." And later: "Cousin,/ we all alone in these streets. I wish you/ horses in rain and fields of broken gates," before concluding "Cousin, why couldn't you/ let us see what you were burying? Cousin/ I wish sunlight on all your fields." Often bold and direct, these poems are stunning in their generosity: two hands open, offering abundance

A beautiful collection of poems about life, being deaf/hoh, and biracial. I was very impressed with Antrobus's use of captioning throughout, creating a sort of irony within the pages (since books are essentially captions in it of itself.) It also sends a message about how hard it is to enjoy media when you are deaf.

The poems do not sway from deep emotion or difficult topics, instead they face it head on and make the reader face it as well. Many poems speak on the injustice and racial prejudice of this world and while it can be a hard thing to bear, it's an important element the reader should consume and learn about.

My favorite poems are: "The Royal Opera House (with Stage Captions)" and "A Paper Shrine."

Raymond Antrobus, author of The Perseverance, gives another quiet, but powerful collection. I can't express enough how thankful I am for this deeply personal and vulnerable collection. There are poems to parents, to the names we are given, to love, to his deafness and the deaf community as well as to his identity of Black/Jamaican and white. I was especially in awe of the intergration of Christine Sun Kim's work. I will walk through the world differently because of it. The constant reminder that sound is more than just something we hear but more often than not something felt is one that every human needs.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57465935-all-the-names-given

I am obsessed with Raymond Antrobus's poetry!! I love his more experimental poems, such as the ones that incorporate closed captioning. His poems have the perfect mix of humor and seriousness (perfectly shown in the set of poems about Thomas Jefferson).

Like all poetry collections, some works stuck with me more than others, but overall this was a tender, sweet, personal collection of work.