The Laughing Barrel | April 2027
Alice James Books
Finalist for the 2025 Alice James Award
Finalist for the 2025 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize
In The Laughing Barrel, DeeSoul Carson considers the absurdities that permeate the lives of Black people — racism, capitalism, genocide, constant personal and communal grief, among others — in a personal examination into the utility of laughter and humour in a country that has yet to shed its oppressive structures.
Expansive in form and register, these poems engage in rhetorical experimentation that highlights the realities facing Black people, how they make sense of their survival, and how they live despite their suffering. The poems are centered around the laughing barrel, an artifact of Afro-American folklore meant to provide a space for Black people to laugh without provoking the reprimand of their white counterparts. The forms of the poems oscillate between sonnets, elegies, and direct addresses to God, asking: in the face of our struggles, what can we do but laugh? And what do we do after that? The poems interrogate faith as the barrel's surrogate and how God serves as a vessel for what we fail to rationalize. The collection is interested in who laughs with Black people when they aren’t in on the joke. When they shouldn’t be laughing at all.
“The poems of The Laughing Barrel testify and tease, weep and wink, dance on the edge of despair. DeeSoul Carson’s far-out forms reshape our everyday. Tony! Toni! Toné!, magnolia trees, and Granny watching Jeopardy! combat spam texts, spam ads, and spam speech. Every line possesses the kind of levity shared by laughter and prayer. Every poem is an invigorating invocation sent up and over to us. This is a remarkable debut by a truly original new poet.”
Terrance Hayes | Author of So to Speak
“Using inventive language and humor as both shield and mirror to the realities of Black life, Carson's debut reveals a rich inner world of devotion, rightful skepticism, and of course the necessity of laughter. The Laughing Barrel is a stunning debut. One whose pages remind us that while we are surveilled by grief, capitalism, and natural disaster, we still have the power to deem every moment Holy: praise be to our grandmothers sipping lemonade, praise be to a living room filled with the hooting and hollering of beloveds, praise be to mothers who show us it is okay to be faithful yet uncertain of the future. Carson's poems remind us that while life might be finite, love isn't. When we hear the silence from a God that doesn't deliver on His promise, love promotes us into becoming our own Gods. This love, that will be here long after empire has run its course, is ripe and abundant like a peach, and we must take a bite and allow it to drip down our lips.”
Karisma Price | Author of I’m Always So Serious
“In this gripping, profound debut, DeeSoul Carson expertly reflects both humor and hurt with piercing lyricism. The Laughing Barrel is playful, profound, and formally adventurous, with a thrillingly unafraid poetic eye, that roams impressively from hummingbirds to Niggas, NASA to God, public transit to spam email, and finally, laughter and love. I was hooked from the first line— I dare you not to be.”
Morgan Parker | Author of You Get What You Pay For
Advance Praise for The Laughing Barrel
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Tupelo Quarterly
"Through powerful meditations on lineage, the body, spoken word, and spiritual contradiction, Carson crafts a book that does not shy away from the absurdities of daily survival in a world that demands Black people shoulder grief without pause."
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Carey Salerno, Executive Director, Alice James Books
“Carson's debut mesmerizes us with its finely-tuned music, rich mythos, and extraordinarily powerful straight talk. The concept of the laughing barrel as a container for Black joy and its relationship to oppressive power structures now and during Jim Crow is palpable. Flush with formally expressive poems that draw from the infinite wealth of Blackness, these poems sink into us, texturally, becoming our bones and having always been our bones.Let there be something to redeem us, states Carson, who examines the utter and tedious endlessness of White want, asking what we stand for and what is standing in our way.”