Promise/Threat: Poems

After storming the scene with Stereo(TYPE), the PEN America Award-winning poet makes his highly anticipated return--with a virtuosic sophomore collection that plunges the reader into the tenebrous realm between dreams and reality and firmly establishes him as an essential voice in American poetry.

"I'm coming to you live," Jonah Mixon-Webster announces early on in Promise/Threat, "from the corner of Shit Blvd. and Out o' Luck St. / with my monkey paws." So begins a three-part journey of a troubled rebirth, one that ushers the reader through all the torment of a Dantean comedy as it climbs unsteadily from darkness to light, navigating an internalized landscape that evokes the Flint, Michigan, of the poet's youth.

In the long central sequence, "Territory," Mixon-Webster sets the reader in a mirror hall of dreams, where one's nemesis (or one's self) is always lurking around the corner. Violences of the waking life trickle into the narrator's sleep as he flees from vision to vision, "picking fruit in one dream and eating it in the next." In the book's third and final section, as the poet begins to wake, he finds that the "real poem is the life I'm writing." Mixon-Webster's musings turn to love and the often-destructive desires it provokes in us as he grapples with how to carry the burden of a past that threatens to sabotage the future.

These are seeking, supple poems whose forms adapt to contain their transfigured images. What emerges in this daring second collection is a surreal and haunting portrait of life in modern America, where pitfalls hide in every promise.

Author: Jonah Mixon-Webster
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: 03/10/2026
Pages: 96
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 9.30h x 7.02w x 0.64d
ISBN: 9780593803066


Review Citation(s):
Booklist 03/01/2026

About the Author
JONAH MIXON-WEBSTER is a poet and conceptual/sound artist from Flint, Michigan. His debut collection, Stereo(TYPE), won the Sawtooth Poetry Prize and the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. He graduated from Eastern Michigan University and received a Ph.D. in creative writing from Illinois State University. He is the recipient of the Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, the Conversation Literary Festival, and the PEN Writing for Justice Program.