Cover reveal: High Jump as Icarus Story by Gustav Parker Hibbett
We’re excited to reveal the cover of the next book from Banshee Press: High Jump as Icarus Story, the poetry debut from Gustav Parker Hibbett. High Jump as Icarus Story will be published on 4 July 2024 and is now available for pre-order!
Just inside the track’s concentric
circus rings, at the football field’s
head, is where I learned to wear
the gaze of other people like a queen
wears feathers.
In High Jump as Icarus Story, Gustav Parker Hibbett gifts us visions of flight and falling. This stunningly accomplished debut deconstructs and redefines notions of Blackness, queerness, and masculinity through the lenses of myth, pop culture, and that most transcendent of sports – the high jump.
Formally inventive, these poems speak in a vulnerable, rapturous voice that urges us to reimagine our possible selves, while navigating a labyrinthine America that conjures its young into monsters. Taking us from the arroyos of New Mexico to a West Cork farm in winter, these meditations on beauty and the elusive nature of love are insightful and hard-won: the spirit triumphs, even when the body falls.
Gustav Parker Hibbett is a Black poet and essayist. They are originally from New Mexico and currently pursuing a PhD at Trinity College Dublin. They are a 2023 Obsidian Foundation Fellow and were selected as a runner-up for The Missouri Review’s 2022 Poem of the Year award. Their work appears in Guernica, fourteen poems, The Stinging Fly, London Magazine, Adroit, and elsewhere.
