Well Played

By Beau Sia

These poems began as an answer. In the face of the undeniable, they became a reckoning. Of the lies that are lived to feel belonging. Of the lies that are told to hide shame. Of the lies that are believed to maintain within illusions. Well Played is a warning to the present, a welcoming of the truth, and a poet working to earn his way.

The poetry in Beau Sia's Well Played is fearless, hard-hitting, uncompromising. His own unflinching self-reflection on race, colonialism, assimilation, representation, white supremacy, identity is a ever-shifting kaleidoscope of words, timelines, and layers of being that spin into something like a survival guide, a trickster's song, a call to action, an incantation for a kinder and more just world. 
— Yumi Sakugawa, author of Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe

The book uses the language we have been afforded to tell the truth about things we have been forbidden to say. It is the context, the set up for every racialized joke used against us. I dare you to read it. At work. Out loud.
— Chinaka Hodge, Screenwriter