Omar Holmon is an Alumni poet of Rutgers University and has competed in slam poetry for numerous years with two final stage appearances at the National Poetry Slam. He has been featured on Button Poetry, Tedx, and a commercial for Laphroaig whiskey (we outchea). In 2014 Omar Holmon Co-founded the Black Nerd Problems website with William Evans, where he spends his days writing essays on pop culture, blackness, and making top quality gifs.
Omar Holmon’s debut book We Were All Someone Else Yesterday is a book of poems and essays that are drenched in both sadness and unmistakable humor.
These works urgently embrace growth in the face of grief.
After the loss of his mother, Holmon loses touch with reality until he re-learns how to live by immersing himself in popular culture. Teeming with references that are palpable, and emotions that pull the heart, Holmon’s debut poetry collection feels profoundly warm and longingly familiar.
Omar Holmon makes us laugh until we cry and then cry until we laugh again. In this candid collection, Holmon’s poems use his distinct voice to jump off the page and make their demands be heard. With each poem, Holmon examines death, grief, and heartache; oscillating between conversational and confessional, Holman addresses pop culture and inner demons – and we get to watch.
– Nicole Homer, author of Pecking Order
Through poems that run the heart down to sweetness with humor, grief, love and rage, Omar Holmon captures his performative electricity and thunders onto the page in this blessed debut. Laughing to tears becomes real ass tears so quick in these poems, Holmon’s skill and wit makes it a dazzling, hard-fought, and wonderfully rocky collection.
– Danez Smith, author of Homie
Buy NowI have long been thankful for the way Omar Holmon is able to balance the tortuous nature of longstanding grief with the levity of humor. And I am most thankful for it in this book, where the spectre of loss haunts always with a loud and echoing laugh, propelling a reader towards brief solace. Anyone who has ever felt sad understands the truth that sadness is not just one thing. It has many faces, and those faces wear many masks. This work honors all of them.
– Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Fortune for Your Disaster
