A hybrid of poetry, collage, and essay forms, Monoculture explores the economic, social, racial, religious, and sexual dimensions of currency in the United States. It begins with cotton crops in the South and follows the tendrils of consequence wherever they lead: into the food we eat, the work we do, the prayers we pray—and into the hungers that are never sated, the work that is never done, the prayers that are never said. Monoculture is a meditation on what happens when we give everything to something that cannot sustain us.
"Brilliance beyond belief. Sharp shrewdly excavates, does the heavy lifting, makes it p[l]ain. Devastating. I am in awe."
—KIRBY, author of she
“In a seamless book-length biographical sequence about living in a commodity-scape, Sharp writes how cotton, this thing of the earth, a plant that produces cloud-like bolls, becomes a geometric landscape, an object of sweat-soaked toil, an ecology of dreams, the surface of ourselves, a node in racial capitalism. Rarely is poetry so discerning of the material operations of capital also so protean--and alive! There the speaker is, a kid, aching in a space riveted by deprivation, monocrop over-fullness, and bible-beating authoritarianism. This one will break your heart and sharpen your thought.”
— JOE HALL, author of Fugue & Strike