Signs, Music: Poems

“Reaches a level of genuine intimacy.”

—Will Harris


“A prayer for a world that might yet look tenderly upon young black life.”

—Victoria Adukwei Bulley


Acclaimed poet Raymond Antrobus returns with Signs, Music, a stunning book of poetry that captures imminent fatherhood and the arrival of a child.

Structured as a two-part sequence poem, Signs, Music explores the before and after of becoming a father with tenderness and care—the cognitive and emotional dissonances between the “hypothetical” and the “real” of fatherhood, the ways our own parents shape the parents we become, and how fraught with emotion, curiosity, and recollection this irreversible transition to fatherhood makes one’s inner landscape.


At once searching and bright, deeply rooted and buoyant, Raymond Antrobus’s Signs, Music is a moving record of the changes and challenges encompassing new parenthood and the inevitable cycles of life, death, birth, renewal and legacy—a testament to the joy, uncertainty, and incredible love that come with bringing new life into the world.