By Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto

The literature of desire, which vastly dramatizes desire in all its ramifications, is an endless resource. Since desire is at the very heart of all human impulses, the foundations of the content of literature are built upon it. Some of the earliest works of literature show human desire as an evil drive, an expression of sensuality, or propensity to covet, or even religious immanence. Homer’s Iliad shows the full range of desire and its destructive forces. The biblical Book of Genesis delineates desire as greed and jealousy. Desire as a violent impulse, in sensual or widely destructive terms, features in much of oral African literature. To the tee, the basis of Shakespeare’s greatest works, from Macbeth to King Lear to Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and others, is desire. Shakespeare, like most of his Elizabethan peers, including Marlowe, often manifested desire as ultimately culminating in self or general destruction.  In poetry, desire can range from Sylvia Plath’s confessional poetry to the spiritual desire of Okigbo’s and Whitman’s poetry, to the natural essence of Li Po’s Tang dynasty verses, to Logan February’s parallelistic oeuvre, or Eliot’s anomalous pessimism. 

Beyond these universal patterns, desire also takes shape within specific histories and conditions. In contemporary African and Diasporic poetry, desire emerges not only as sexual or psychological yearning, but as an experience inflected by exile, migration, race, and socio-economic realities. Desire is also central to the exilic poems that have carved a niche in contemporary African poetry, of which Warsan Shire, Gbenga Adesina, Romeo Oriogun and Gbenga Adeoba are notable voices. It is within this concrete tradition that Tawanda Mulalu, who emigrated to America as a high schooler, emerges. In his debut collection Please Make Me Pretty, I Don’t Want to Die (2022), the Botswanan poet engages desire as both a physical experience of sensuality and as something manifested in the psychological struggles of Black existence in a plural society. His poetry shows how desire is at once physical and existential, and how it becomes a negotiation for survival, belonging, and political meaning.

One of the metaphors that asserts itself in Mulalu’s Please Make Me Pretty, I Don’t Want to Die — directly from the fact that the collection is divided into four sections: “Summer,” “Fall,” “Winter,” and “Spring” — is his appropriation of weather seasons as a simulacra for volatile human emotions. Here, Mulalu presents desire as symptomatic of the same sporadic, sequential, and seasonal aspect as the weather. In the clement seasons, desire gives a sense of a visceral need; in the inclement months, it is the harbinger of pain, uncontrollable yet there — an undesire. 

Just as the seasons shift between abundance and barrenness, Mulalu also locates the origins of desire in a more intimate landscape — the solitude of the self. Mulalu’s journey of desire often begins with loneliness, a condition that naturally gives rise to longing and, in turn, to desire. In “Still Life,” he dramatizes this cycle by turning to images of onanism, describing it as “like coffee without the cream” (5), a biblical allusion that emphasizes the bitterness of abortive lovemaking. The metaphor stresses the sense of futility in desire that does not lead to intimacy, connection, or creation. This non-reproductive desire, desire without growth, captures a recurring anxiety in Mulalu’s work: the body’s yearning that produces no lasting fulfillment. His reflection, “Nothing’s growing. I don’t finish. / So I am part of this thing where fish learned to walk” (5), suggests that even in apparent stagnation, desire remains an evolutionary impulse, a restless drive that insists on transformation, however incomplete. In this way, loneliness and non-reproductivity are not isolated conditions but intertwined states, both revealing how desire simultaneously exposes absence and gestures toward change.

As he reflects in “Elegy,” desire is not a wholesome want or longing, but a series of mixed emotions about existence, which, in the end, repeats itself: “I am flooded with other people’s selves, their quiet traumas, their various walking speeds across the river. I have seen someone walk on water. Nor could I blame my father for an event horizon he just happened to have ejaculated me into” (11). Also, the recurrence of certain titles across the collection—several versions of “Elegy,” “Prayer,” and “Sonnet” — creates more than a structural motif; it provides a shifting perspective on desire itself. These repetitions reframe the longing at the center of the poems; they show desire as an evolving process that returns with new nuance. By repeating titles, Mulalu suggests that desire is cyclical, always resurfacing in altered forms, much like the seasons that frame the collection. The effect is to emphasize how desire resists closure, and how it cannot be satisfied once and for all, but keeps reemerging, layered with memory, loneliness, and the weight of race and immigration. Repetition, then, becomes both a formal device and an existential truth in the collection. It mirrors how desire lingers, refuses resolution, and continually reasserts itself in the lives of Mulalu’s speakers.

Mulalu is not abashed about exploring the rawness of the erotic, the basest sexual craving. This rawness is never gratuitous; the explicitness of the sensual innuendo often becomes a vehicle for metaphor, a way of pushing language toward the threshold where the bodily and the poetic collapse into each other. In “Newness,” in the “Winter” section, the erotic imagery is sharpened into metaphorical expression, while in “Frenzy” we see an almost paradoxical tenderness emerge from the very site of physical desire: “loved you further than the recesses of myself into / my melanin” (55). This suggests that erotic love, for Mulalu, can be both vulnerable and transcendent, a mode of knowing oneself and the other. What makes this even more compelling is how he layers desire with other primal appetites. In “Aria,” for instance, hunger and sexual longing are conflated, and reveal how physical need and erotic yearning share a grammar of urgency. Mulalu further dramatizes desire as a spectrum of impulses through cultural allusions, particularly to Karen Carpenter and Sylvia Plath. The Plathian reference implies that sexual desire can also be a means of negotiating depression and the anxieties of existence:

This layering of erotic desire with cultural and psychological registers opens onto another of Mulalu’s strengths — confessionality. The same vulnerability and intimacy that emerge in “Frenzy” or in his Plathian allusions also shape the voice in poems like “Second Sonnet” — “I pretend a knowing of your skin or / beneath it the wells of yourself over the time it took / you here. Where and who do I go with without / myself?” (47). In this context, confessionality is a recognition that intimacy blurs the boundary between self and beloved.

Another pitch of Mulalu’s poetry is how desire can excavate varied feelings of shame, “unbelonging,” intangibility, and disconnection with the physical, where sex, the longing for bodily immanence, is an attempt to embrace the tangible, to touch the deepest aspects of the soul. This excavation naturally lends itself to confession, since the poems hinge on exposing vulnerabilities and private longings that are often left unspoken. By situating shame and intimacy side by side, Mulalu’s speakers reveal themselves in ways that blur the line between private reflection and public testimony. The confessional posture in his work arises from the recognition that desire, in its intersections with race, migration, and loneliness, must be voiced in order to be confronted. In the prose-poem “Prayer” from the Winter section, it is illustrated through a tabulation of wishes: 

The passion of the love and longing expressed at this point resides entirely in the word “wish” (several dictionaries describe “wish” as a “desire” or “hope”). For the poem’s speaker, there appears to be a straightforward understanding of their wants or what they hope for, except for what they call “embryonic curses,” which could be anything around the gendering (or not) of desire. Crucially, as seen in the poems “Symphony” and “Song,” desire operates as both lyrical bliss and a vehicle to explore sexual ambiguity. The profession of wishes or the angling for wish-fulfillment is an aspect of desire, if we are to take the Freudian dream thesis seriously. In principle, Mulalu places dreams at the junction of emotional uncertainty in which young individuals experience responsibility and obligation as a devotion towards themselves and their origins. These sentiments can be as lyrical as in “All We Got Was Autumn. All We Got Was Winter”: 

Progressively, we get a rundown through what can be called the Millennial trauma of existence, the dilemma of a generation marked by unfulfilled sensual dreams. It is utterly ironic that the advances of modernity have not had any effect on emotional fulfillment. One gets the sense, in Mulalu’s poems, that it has gotten worse, as seen in “Forgiveness Rocks Record.” Within this framework, the speaker voices an intergenerational dread — “he is begging me, really begging me, to change my / life to not reach the age of I have wasted my life” (45) — a plea that captures the pervasive fear of wasted potential. Longing is voiced in urgent, intimate cadences — “I love you & I want to be with you & you’re a good / person & people like you & you’re beautiful…” — however, it collapses into abstraction, “how unlike the moon is to the sun, but how they hold / one another…” (45). 

Mulalu’s conflation of politics and desire — or politics as desire — does not merely reside in the seasons of gloom, Fall and Winter, but also appears quite visibly in many of the poems in the so-called bright seasons, Summer and Spring. The seasonality of desire and want in Mulalu’s language operates upon the knowledge of an inadequate world, and it is this inadequacy, both in the speakers of the poems and in the world in which the poet places them, that warrants a need to attain safety or to assuage desire. Often, by the vehicle of language, it becomes clear to us that the speakers of Mulalu’s poems are disconnected and disaffected individuals in a spatial iteration of America, usually immigrants such as the poet himself. Adrift and far from home, they navigate the dangers and frustrations of racial and economic deprivation. Desire here becomes a longing for belonging. The speaker in “Elegy” from the “Summer” section of the book, speaks on the range of these anxieties: 

I mean all genders get along if someone else suffers for peace, says every human arrangement of tar, toil and torture. It’s a pretty skyline. In a plane that thunders towards another human arrangement, they stuff me in Economy. There is always someone who works harder than me. There is always someone who is more of a morning person. There is always someone else who isn’t as pretty as you. (11)

Here, Mulalu frames desire as inseparable from systems of inequality. The speaker’s longing for beauty, intimacy, and recognition is constantly undercut by the reality of economic deprivation and social hierarchy. Even in an apparently mundane setting — an airplane seat — the body is positioned in relation to class and labor, turning personal desire into a political commentary on exclusion. The tension arises because the intimacy of comparing oneself to “someone else” collides with the larger machinery of structural oppression. The poet leaves no illusion as to the impediment of capitalism in a society whose individuals are filled with desires. Poems such as “The World,” which carries this line “Every burner on the stove is a capitalist” (16), problematize this. The disruptions that economic necessity causes in a capitalist system are always shown as not just a creator of desire in itself, but also a barricade against romantic exploration. The speakers see themselves as people who cannot partake in the ferment of desire among their peers and therefore are reduced to self-pleasure. Hence, Mulalu presents desire as a politicized state: one’s capacity to want, to feel pretty, or to belong is always mediated by the violence and inequities of the world. This layering makes desire both intensely personal and inevitably public, a force that cannot be detached from the sociopolitical arrangements in which it unfolds.

Mulalu’s poetic discourse of racial uncertainty is extensive and deeply felt as personal experience. In “Miscegenation Elegy,” he excavates the complicated product of desire across the chequered history of race in America. At one point, the speaker tells us: “The stars also suffer. Immense and dead, their gases burn / distant like castanets of antebellum teeth” (8). At another point, the speaker also observes that “Historians archive our care / as an axe upon a ladybird” (8). What we see herein is a vision of wants and needs of a people cast away — a reality which the poet explores through the conduit of personal experience. “Film Studies,” in the same vein, reflects on racial representation, particularly the fragility of depicting Black intimacy: “These black lovers on-screen / save themselves from concrete” (13). The line emphasizes how images of Black love must resist the weight of stereotypes that reduce Black presence to violence or danger. This concern with racial imagery also lays the groundwork for Mulalu’s critique of capitalism in the poems that follow. The speaker’s recognition that even intimate portrayals are shaped by systemic forces points us toward the broader social and economic structures that regulate desire. At this point, Mulalu begins to suggest that the misrepresentation of Black life is rooted in capitalism’s power to define Black desire the most, then value and visibility.

Notwithstanding its reveling in varied language, Mulalu goes even deeper into the politics of race and desire in certain poems. The poem, “Poem About My Life Mattering,” contends with the racial profiling that plagues America and its divisive politics. Mulalu is acutely aware of the power play that assigns the West superiority over Africa, posing and answering questions on the liquidation of racial desires and hope. And “where is black life / found? Surely not in an atlas given how they cull the size / of the Continent down as carefully managed roach control” (67). The question of compressing Africans’ entire being and aspiration into one of primitive needs remains problematic. This denigration is put in contrast as typical of America’s racialized attitudes:

The states of mind and desire into which Mulalu lets us in are ones shaped and constrained by socio-economic realities. Desire in his work is never free-floating; it is accented by particular places and moments, always tempered by race, immigration, and class. What might appear to be the arbitrariness of longing is, in fact, a constructed condition, pressed upon by history and the forces of the present. In this light, Mulalu reveals desire as a life-or-death matter — an existential negotiation in which intimacy, survival, and political belonging converge.

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Works Cited 

Descartes, René. The Passions of the Soul. Translated by Stephen Voss, Hackett Publishing, 1989.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Translated by James Strachey, W.W. Norton, 1990.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Translated by James Strachey, W.W. Norton, 1989.

Hofmann, Wilhelm, and Loran F. Nordgren, editors. The Psychology of Desire. The Guilford Press, 2015.

Mulalu, Tawanda. Please Make Me Pretty, I Don’t Want to Die. Princeton University Press, 2022.

Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics. Translated by Edwin Curley, Penguin Classics, 2005.

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Read more in this issue: Interview | Poems | Writing Prompt

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By Diamond Forde, PhD

I haven’t written a poem in two years. Though I’ve tried, bumbled often through the gray light of an early morning tryna squeeze a poem from the dulcet notes of wren song. Before the bustle. Before the lesson plans and half-assed plans for brunch. Before job crises, student crises, and family crises, too. Before touch-hungry dogs and love-hungry partners. During co-writing hangouts, huddled over a tablet, determined, just to give up and bottom them sad scraps of lyric into a Google folder to never be seen again. Most of my mornings stay looped like this: sitting down at my writing desk, blanket hoodie bunching at my hips, coffee mug of Mountain Dew teetering in my right hand, sloshing, then, like clockwork, the question finds me, who am I writing for—and I remember that no one is waiting, so I close the document, turn off my computer, and tend to the rest of my day.

Truth is, I’ve been afraid to write. Afraid that I’m the wrong one writing—that there are better voices to be listening to, and that there is more than listening to be doing, when, this morning alone, more than 50 Palestinians have been murdered or gone missing in another airstrike, and the Trump administration is blocking international students from Harvard, and the ACLU is tracking more than 575 anti-LGBTQ bills under consideration in the United States right now. What can poetry do to stop all of this, I wonder? What can my writing do to save us?

To be clear, I’m not so egotistical as to believe that I’m capable of saving anybody. But I like to think that poetry is as much a crafted expression of Self-interest as it is an expression of We-interest. There is always an us, a we, in poetry. Nearly sixteen years since my first poetry workshop, sixteen years since the first time I was ushered in by Rita Dove, Patricia Smith, Elizabeth Alexander, and Ai [the poet], since the first time I found permission to pen my boldest, Blackest problems on the white ass page, and every navigation of the relationship between me and poetry since has been defining the space between me and we. An amendment: there is always an us, a we, in Black poetry.

In the introduction to Renegade Poetics, Evie Shockley makes visible the intangible “we” defining Black aesthetic movements. She outlines the (male) heavy-hitters defining Black literary criticism and canonization during the Black Arts Movement, explaining how their interests in a Black aesthetic defined Black poetry’s presupposed aspirations towards musicality, spirituality, speech, and allusion, and that the supposition delineated the parameters of what is or is not Black poetry, even in the Black avant garde. But beyond the affirmations of canon—when we define “we” through the subjectively correlated hallmarks of an aesthetic considered (solely) “Black” (under what authority? under whose framework?), we perpetuate the dichotomies of “us v. them” intra-racially. As Shockley writes, “We think we know, even though there is hardly a ‘we’ we could delimit”[i].Who exists in the margins of “we”?

If Evie Shockley’s suddenly we should be an answer, then the answer lies in Black women. Shockley’s book is an archival project dependent on the collective acknowledgement of Black creators and their contribution to art and its study. It is a book entirely aware of its own trajectory, dependent on the aforementioned archive but also on a personal, historical, and cultural exploration of we. Shockley conjures in this book a (Black girl) magic threaded through the intersections of lineage, experimentation, diaspora, wonder, and time. This collection is, in every iteration, a “wake” book[ii] tracing the arc (ark) of the slave ship’s waves through history. The simultaneity of past-now-future throughout this book tasks us, knowingly, with asking what is, or ever could be, “sudden”—when the lost track of time[iii]. that is currently shaping our lives is-has-been-and-will-be, like a record, spinning its loop.

We is in this loop.

But who is we? I turn to the first poem of Shockley’s book, a stunning introduction looping tighter on the possibility of “we.” In the first section of the poem “alma’s arkestral vision (or, farther out),” Shockley explores “we” in concrete. A calligram spelling out the word “we”—the poem composed entirely out of 44 pronouns, 43 repeated utterances of “you” and a single utterance of “me”—makes that me so small, so seemingly insignificant, that it is almost quiet enough to miss. Who is left in the margins of “we”? 

If Evie Shockley’s suddenly we should be an answer, then the answer is Mabbie. The first time I read Gwendolyn Brooks, I was in grad school (I know, I know), in my first ever Black literature course (I know, I know), when I startled across this poem called, “The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie”[iv]. Mabbie, a dark-skinned Black girl in grade school, is smitten with a boy named Willie Boone. She waits for Willie outside the school gates—excited, I imagined, to walk home together, maybe giggle over lunchtime gossip or bemoan the math homework—whatever girls like her (me/we[v]) would do back then. But then Mabbie sees Willie Boone leaving the school with a “lemon-hued lynx” on his arm, and all her dreams deflate. The poem ends in its final quatrain:

Brooks’ ballad found/finds me through simultaneity—that it was/is, at once and always, inseparably raced, classed, and gendered—as I/we, too, are now/have been, inseparably raced, classed, and gendered. It is a poem constructed in past and prophecy, a lineage of Mabbies, like her/me, finding kinship in the wound of we. This is, I think, what Shockley’s “me” within the “we” means most in the calligram; not the fallacy of American individualism but the recognition that you, me, and we are constructs constructing. That you and me create we, and we creates you and me, too. We belong to each other, and sometimes that belonging comes from the hurt we feel, but sometimes that belonging can come from the want we have to heal each other, too. We are most ourselves when we are me and you. 

And this is what is tricky about we, Shockley’s calligram reminds us. If there is more than one way to read the singular “me” in the arkestral, then there is more than one way to read “we,” too. If we is community, is diaspora, and as I hope there is more than one you that will find this essay, then there might be more than one we that can find us, too. As Shockley explains in an interview with Poets House:

“Community” is a term that stands in for a lot: common interests and diversity of opinion; sometimes nurture and sometimes constraint; collectivity that might be to some degree voluntary and to some degree imposed; a base of both social and political relations. I’ve been lucky to have been a part of many different kinds of communities in my life.”

Let us parse we at its dichotomous nature. Let us position we at its communal poles. If the dichotomy potentially defining community is nurture and constraint, then the parameters defining “we,” defining the diasporic limits of Black poetry, which has been defined with all good intention to nurture, to survive, might also exist at its polar limits to constrain, at least, depictions of me for the collectivity of we to prosper. To contextualize that through a previously mentioned example, one could argue (wrongly) that “The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie” is not (yet) a Black poem. Even Brooks described herself pre-1967 as “a ‘new negro’ becoming black”[vi]. Writing from the position of this interim Blackness, Brooks presumably couldn’t actualize her “Blackness” until she became conscious of herself as an African poet, “or better yet a conscious African woman in America who chose poetry as her major craft”[vii].

I want to parse the syntax of that sentence—how its use of relative and prepositional clauses turn each descriptor toward the conditional, as if it is the condition of the African to be woman, to be poet, as if these identities are just circumstances that can inconsequentially happen, as if each identifier proceeding the word “African” aligns through the tight control of grammar to its place in the hierarchy. For the collectivity of Blackness, it seems to suggest, womanness is secondary. For the collectivity of Blackness, it seems to suggest, poetry is secondary. Americanness, secondary (though I have never known another home / to cut me[viii] as deep). For Black-woman-American-poets surviving the collectivity of we might mean piecemealing herself and her history. For example, while we might not consider the ballad a “black form,” to suggest that “The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie” is any less Black because of its form ignores the history of enslavement that has brought the ballad to our doorstep; it also ignores what Evie Shockley points out in her analysis of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Anniad”, and how Brooks was tasked with creating a black aesthetic “highly attuned to the interplay between race, gender, and class”[ix]. So when the Brooks/Shockley/me/we of Black women writers are tasked with achieving a black aesthetic through erasure, we have to seriously consider how the demand to reposition Self-interest as subordinate to We-Interest might inadvertently mean to harm us. If the Self is secondary to the needs of the diasporic we, then what can my writing do to save us?

But again, as Shockley’s calligram reminds us, if there is never a “me” in “we” then the “we” stays incomplete. “The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie” is Black (or should be) because it is the product of a distinctly Black American experience, a collection of Black American experiences produced through centuries of enslavement, rape, and miscegenation laws that have guided the intricacies of colorism, passing, and the paper bag test into being. To suggest that this poem is less Black because it relies on a European form, again, tries to ahistoricize white supremacy, while making invisible the experiences of Black American women then and now. This is why, when Audre Lorde writes that “poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless,[x]” I have to imagine that she didn’t mean just ideas. Who or what is the nameless kept behind every poem? Who is the reader, the influence, the archive, the history? Who is the poet made nameless through canonization’s culling? How do we name and nurture the “me” and the “you” who makes the “we” possible?    

And this is what makes Shockley’s suddenly we so necessary—a voice against the erasures of we as constraint; this book makes malleable the we through linguistic-and-linear slippage. Organized into four sections, suddenly we continuously severs and tethers the linkages between Black American communities through time. In the book’s first section, for example. “we:: becoming and going”, Shockley embodies the “becoming” of a diasporic community simultaneously connected and disconnected through the legacies of transatlantic enslavement. In the poem, “the beauties: third dimension,” for instance, Shockley unravels a poem in eleven parts: Lula Bell, Carolina, Dot, Savannah, Matti Lee, Rose, Fannie Mae, Sarah, Zeddie, Mammy, and Queen. The invocation of these names is purposeful; accompanied by images of the previously named slave ships, “the beauties” speaks to and away from that history, coming and going between past and present, embodiment and disembodiment, and taking the reader along through that shift. What does it mean that in a poetic section named “Carolina,” I am at once asked to consider a woman’s name, a pair of states (North Carolina, where Shockley and I have both taught), and the 47 slave ships that all shared the same name[xi]? How does the invocation of those possibilities speak towards the possibilities of Black embodiment, of we? As Shockley writes in the opening lines of “Lula Bell”:

What does it mean that the body we are referring to is the hull of a slave ship? What does it mean when the ship has had more embodiment, more humanity, than the supposed cargo it carried, and that this ship is the vehicle, the tangible connection that outlives the human body to (with)hold both memory and history? How does that hierarchy of embodiment influence Black embodiment even now? Where does the slave ship exist in the collectivity of we?  

In an effort to build community in a temporal and physical landscape that has and would deny me me, how does community work to return me to me (as I work to return we to we, too)? After all, we can be beautifully symbiotic; we is the only means we have to surviving. Me and you need we. Which is why there is no coincidence that suddenly we is composed with over twenty dedications and epigraphs aftered after Black artists and literary figures—Willie Cole, Allison Saar, Nikky Finney, and Cheryl A. Wall, to name a few. Shockley’s poem, “blues-elegy for cheryl” pays loving homage to Wall’s contribution as a mother—to the field of Black literature (“she weeded our mothers’ gardens with tender loving care / tended hurston and cade and morrison (&&&!) all with loving care) and to the love she had for her own daughter (“if you wanted to see her glow, call her daughter’s name / o, she beamed brightest at the sound of her daughter’s name”) Shockley illustrates how, for Cheryl Wall, We-work and Self-work can be linked by through nurture and love.

I mean “love” in the legacy of bell hooks’ philosophical exploration All About Love: New Visions, in which hooks quotes M. Scott Peck in The Road Less Traveled, to define love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth”; I would like to believe that Shockley’s suddenly we amends that definition, changes the “or” to “and”—so that we is the love we will to nurture ourselves and our community, especially in those moments we need each other most.

Which brings me to the ghost of time haunting the periphery of this collection—this is a pandemic book, with poems like “the lost track of time” presumably written in the middle of the 2020 lockdown. I mention this marker of time as a reminder of what profound isolation can do to one’s relationship with both Self and community. We are still struggling to understand how much we need community, how much community needs us. The pandemic is still happening, but it’s our own insistence on the individual needs of you and me that keeps us now from asking who we become when our days are no longer defined by time nor community. In “fruitful,” Shockley opens, “you grow my garden, no, you are / the whole of it” and in so doing, reminds me of the necessity of community to the self’s self-interest, purpose, and wonder. But the poem also expands the possibility of we to include the non-human, too, to expand the multiplicitous definitions of “we” even toward the boundaries that I have overlooked in the unpacking of the limitations of a Black aesthetic while writing this. (Who is left on the margins of “we”?—the pines, the peach orchards, the parsnips and the parsley.)

This is what is so constraining about the parameters of “we”; that in the very nature of delineating “Black poetry,” we corner the possibilities; we askew environment and history and self (“&&&!”). We compartmentalize. We limit. As Elizabeth Alexander writes, when “we name the experimental, as we name any quality, moment, school, or movement in literature” we are doing so “in large part from the vantage point of today”[xii]. (What is, or ever could be, “sudden”?)

I want to be clear that I am not criticizing the act of naming our borders (because within those borders, we construct the means through which our communities survive). I mean to question the materiality of the borders we made/make/will make; what materials we have used/use/will use to shape our borders, and where those materials came/come/will come from. Is it truly possible to imagine borders as multi-lectical expressions of a community that was-is-and-will-be changing? I can’t say (alone). But as “poetry’s ev(ie)angelist” writes, “language has baggage—but the good news is art can renew / and resee it” [xiii].

Then let us renew/resee it—the we we bring to poetry.

And I want to be honest, I still haven’t written a poem[xiv]. Maybe the conundrum of we is a question my art still ain’t ready for, but me is malleable, ever-changing, and Evie Shockley’s suddenly we is the kind of book that makes me believe that the effort of re-defining, or returning to the inane loop of the page, makes a future for me/for you/for the nurturing we still possible, and maybe like suddenly we, the right project can/has/and will start when the nurturing we we need has found us[xv].

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[i] See page two of the “Introduction: Renegade Poetics (Or, Would Black Aesthetics by An[y] Other Name Be More Innovative?)” from Evie Shockley’s Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry.  

[ii] I am referencing Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.

[iii] This is a reference to a poem of the same name in Shockley’s suddenly we. I will return to this poem later.

[iv] From A Street in Bronzeville (1945)

[v] I want to be clear that I am aware there are readers for which the “we” might not apply, and that is part of the conundrum of “we.” We can find some of us, but not all of us, which means the “we” in this essay is built on both fact and fiction, simultaneously. 

[vi] I am quoting Haki R. Madhubuti’s Preface to Gwendolyn Brooks’ biography, Report from Part One, specifically pages 14-17 throughout this paragraph.  

[vii] Again, this quote is from Madhubuti’s Preface to Report from Part One.

[viii] I should make note that there are multiple but simultaneous variations of the I/Me that exists within this essay; there are several dissonances that I/ you/ we as readers have to navigate between the Self that exists in space (embodied Self v. page Self—which other, better writers have written about before me), the Self that exists in time—(the version of Diamond who wrote this essay v. the version of Diamond who edits, for instance), and the Self constructed in intention (that the “I” that I have written here hopes that you might see me in yourself). The latter suggesting that the “I” can and does perform as a collectivity sometimes is important because it further complicates the question of we in this essay.

Of course, I mention this because the conundrum of “I” is exactly what Shockley is invested in exploring in her book—as in this essay, the “I” in suddenly we is multiplicious. Consider, for instance, what Shockley says about the “I” in her poem, “Perched” in an interview on Electric Literature:

“One of my main interests in the book is how our understanding of ourselves as individuals interacts with, informs, limits, or opens up the ways we imagine ourselves in relation to others—groups of others. The poem “perched” is an important one for signaling this interest, if quietly, in ways that are suggestive for lots of other poems in the book. Like so many poems in the African American tradition, it uses what some have called “the i that means we,” which allows an individual experience to stand in for a widely shared or generic Black experience. The poem is ekphrastic, thus its i is plural in a more specific sense: it is the young girl figured in the sculpture, “Blue Bird”; it is something I imagine or sense in the experience or emotional repertoire of the sculptor, Alison Saar; and it’s some aspect of myself.”

To contend fully with the conundrum of we in this essay andits engagement with Shockley’s work, “we” must understand how the seemingly singular “I” might also function as a marker of we, too. Shockley’s “I” ushers a larger participating community into the fold (the young girl in “Blue Bird”, Alison Saar), which means that an argument of “I” cannot depend on a singular idea of the Self, either.

And there are interesting conundrums abound in the opening of a multiplicious “I.” Some affirm the importance of the same questions I’ve implementing around “we” like, what are the parameters of participation in the “I”? What does it say that the “I”s between the “I” in Shockley’s poem perched have been linked through emotional reciprocity and an act of creation—does this say something about the potential shape of community in black writing, or could it be a nod to the simultaneously me-you-we-affirming principles of a nurturing we, or is it just one more valuable reminder that we/me/you need each other. What is Self-work if we can acknowledge that the self is we, too?

But these questions exist just off-script, an aside someone somewhere is having.

[ix] The quote is from page 31 on the first chapter of Shockley’s Renegade Poetics, “Changing the Subject: Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Anniad,” in which Shockley points out the conflicting audiences and expectations Brooks was forced to navigate in the creation of her aesthetic. 

[x] The quotation is from Poetry is not a Luxury.  

[xi] From the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade – Database on slavevoyages.org

[xii] This is the opening sentence from “New Ideas about Black Experimental Poetry.”

[xiii] From the final lines of Shockley’s poem “prefixed” (p. 73) in suddenly we.

[xiv] Two days after completing this essay, I wrote my first poem draft in two years.

[xv] Following the acknowledgements of suddenly we, Shockley writes that the poems from the project were written only because she was asked to do so: “To those who reached out with warm invitations and gentle requests, whether they led to poems or not, I offer gratitude.”

And to the ones who found me, who made me write and want to write this essay—thank you. You brought poetry back to me—let’s keep writing.

Read more in this issue: Interview | Poems | Writing Prompt

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Dr. Diamond Forde is the author of two poetry collections, Mother Body (Saturnalia Books, 2021) and The Book of Alice (Scribner Books, 2026). She has received a Doctorate in Creative Writing at Florida State University (with a specialization in African American poetics and fat studies), and an MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Alabama. Forde has received nomination and recognition in the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery award, and as a Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellow. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Obsidian, Callaloo, and elsewhere. Forde serves as the “Interviews” Editor with Honey Literary, as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville, and as an avid lover of colorful dresses. Find out more at her website: http://www.diamondforde.com 

By Rhony Bhopla

Shara McCallum is the author of seven books of poetry, including her forthcoming title, Behold (Alice James Books, 2026). Her works span from 1999, with the following titles: The Water Between Us, This Strange Land, The Face of Water: New & Selected Poems, Madwoman, La historia es un cuarto/History is a Room (a full-length anthology of selected poems translated into Spanish), and No Ruined Stone. McCallum is a tenured full-time faculty member at Penn State University and teaches in the Pacific University Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program. Her literary work has been widely anthologized, translated, and published in Italian, French, Romanian, Turkish, and Dutch. McCallum’s awards include a Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem Fellowships, and awards from 1996 to the present. She is a Penn State Poet Laureate Emerita and received recognition for No Ruined Stone with a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry in 2022, which places her literary work and art activism alongside extraordinary Black writers throughout the history of the Hurston/Wright Foundation’s 35 years.

In a reading at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, in 2021, McCallum described the process of writing her sixth poetry collection, No Ruined Stone, as “active waiting.”[1] McCallum’s reflections on how poems emerge both extend the poems’ meanings and describe a metacognitive process by which an artist engages scholarly study. McCallum shared that after being invited by artist Calum Colvin to read with his exhibit at the Royal Academy of Scottish Art and Architecture in Edinburgh, she was inspired to write a poem that came to her in the voice of Isabella, who is the seminal character in No Ruined Stone. After a sustained period of years of research in Scotland, McCallum began writing the collection, which she has also labeled as a novel in verse. She described the writing as “active waiting, not passive waiting.” Active waiting alludes to a paradoxical cognitive process. McCallum’s self-reflection and critique of how the poems in No Ruined Stone began to take shape in her imagination models how awareness of the writing process is imperative to the formation of creative works. Active would be the writer’s concerted effort with intentionality toward writing that involves research and reflection; while waiting, on the other hand, appears to push against intentionality and adds the pressure of time.

Shara McCallum spent three years conducting research for her book, which took her to Scotland to study the places where Robert Burns lived, and where she immersed herself in archives and engaged with artists who were interrogating the life and works of Burns. This active waiting was also instrumental in widening the circle of appreciation for the history of poetry in Scotland. Subsequently, with what McCallum describes as an emergence of Isabella’s voice, she was led to create poems that traverse history and place, and those ultimately became a feminist articulation of what it means to be of the forced diaspora of the African continent.

Feminist theorist and philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak delivers an invocation to practitioners of artistry in her book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of a Vanishing Present. Spivak declares that the essential practice of learning about the subaltern—those of social groups on the margins of history and who are the subjects of oppressors due to their marginalization from the mainstream—cannot be learned about “only by reading literary texts, or, mutatis mutandis, sociohistorical documents…”[2] This process of living in the spaces of a character, rather than being a haphazard voyeur through media and study, is the essential practice of a multimedia artist. It is by this concerted approach that Shara McCallum has integrated her scholarly work throughout her career as a writer. Readers, in turn, are enriched with multitudinous and courageous movements on the page, which are achieved by McCallum’s thorough process of sustained phenomenology and qualia that usher artistic contemplation. McCallum’s active, slow visual thinking while reflecting during art observation, as well as her engagement with archived histories, models a deliberate approach toward exactitude in developing poems.

In McCallum’s author’s note for No Ruined Stone, she explains her discovery that Robert Burns, the Scottish poet, was on the verge of going to Jamaica as a “bookkeeper” and would have been an overseer of a plantation where by the “late 18th century, over a third of the whites in Jamaica were Scottish, and Scots owned 30% of the plantations and 32% of enslaved Africans on the island. Jamaica was the most valuable British colony during slavery, producing the greatest wealth for individual plantation owners and building the empire.” McCallum writes, “It was also the most brutal colony, and on Scots-owned Jamaican plantations the survival rate for Africans was the lowest across the island: less than four years upon arrival.” [3] This realization about the intentions of the revered poet, Burns, sparked the creation of the poetry collection, which is divided into two distinct sections. The first series of poems features dramatic monologues in the voices of the Bard and Robert Burns.

Notable connections can be made between the analysis of McCallum’s work and that of theorist Spivak’s section on literature in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Spivak’s matter-of-fact critique of the conflation of the characterization of marginalization, such as gender studies, feminism, and racial grouping, informs the writer who grapples with having to tell the story but also wants to present the facts of humanity. The written page is an absolute place of ideas, on which dynamic inspiration is transformed into a two-dimensional artifact. However, contemporary poets such as McCallum are making way for a body of work by Anglophone writers whose ancestors endured colonialism and enslavement. In this process, there is a continual excavation of how the othering of people takes place as a result of racial hegemony in textual representation. Spivak contends, “…we tend to monumentalize something we call ‘margins,’ where the distinction between North and South is domesticated. Yet, for the sake of the daily work at the ground level, we must still raise the persistent voice of autocritique, lest we unwittingly fill the now unrecognizably displaced subject-position of the native informant.” [4] The native informant is the perilous liaison between the colonizer and the colonized, who repeats and reinforces the episteme of the subjugator.

Spivak’s assertion regarding autocritique offers a way to read the juxtaposition of Isabella and Burns. While historical Burns had made plans three times—all failed—to go to Jamaica as an overseer on a plantation, McCallum creates a Burns who does go to Jamaica and has an intact personhood—a man who reveals his humanity as well as his complicity through complex emotions. This evokes provocative dueling perspectives as readers have to work to parse out the instigator from the victim of harm in the brutality of colonial subjugation. For example, in the poem “For Promised Joy,” Burns describes intense emotional love for an enslaved woman named Nancy: Suffer me to want her. / Suffer me to ask for nothing / but laughter, hers filling / the drafts and breathing/hollows of my room…[5] In this poem, Burns is ascribed intense emotional love, and McCallum amplifies his feelings with the anaphoric repetition “suffer me”. For Burns, love and violence are co-embodied. The poem borders on obsession and is certainly ironic given the power dynamic between Burns and the enslaved woman who is the object of his passion. His bearing witness to the horrors of slavery adds a grotesque element to his emotions.

Furthermore, in response, Douglas, who is the Master at Springbank, admonishes Burns and brutally epitomizes the grave and inhumane epistemic violence by which white superiority spews hatred toward other races. Here is the beginning of “Douglas’s Reply”[6]:

This poem in Douglas’s voice uses erotesis (questions that require no answer), a figure of speech that has the effect of confrontation. Douglas’s aggressive tone and feverish hatred for enslaved Africans depict chilling and horrific sentiments of white superiority. Additionally, McCallum’s “Douglas’s Reply” demonstrates a mindset that serves as justification of exploitation of resources, physical violence, rape, and ultimately the teaching of generational hatred toward those who were historically colonized during the 18^th Century. McCallum’s transparent and courageous representations in this monologue elucidate her research, revealing that Jamaica was the most “brutal colony, and on Scots-owned Jamaican plantations the survival rate for Africans was the lowest across the island: less than four years upon arrival.”[7]

The complexities of human emotions are where poetry and truth trouble each other in the collection. On the one hand, Burns’s idea of love in the midst of violent debasement of humanity is idiocy; on the other hand, Douglas’s command to deny feeling is another manifestation of hatred. The characters wrestle against each other, pitting desperation, anger, provocation, and insult, which open a perspective on the undercurrent of imperial control. Its grip was maintained through rationalized deterrence of humanity for the purpose of exploitation and harm to the African people in this distinct and vulnerable part of the world, the Caribbean. Burns himself is no exception; his mind is arrested by pain and conflict. Could we have empathy for such a man, one who “came to Jamaica” to have a hand in violence against the enslaved, that time in history of abject destruction which ultimately led to the suffering and erasure of people, their land, dignity, language and had a hand in shaping a future of persistent inequity and racial oppression? The answer is encapsulated in the second half of the collection, as told through Isabella’s voice and her journey toward self-actualization.

In the scheme of No Ruined Stone, Burns has a child with Nancy. The child is Agnes, who is Jamaican “Mulatta” and who in adulthood is raped by Douglas. Isabella is the daughter of Agnes and Douglas, and she eventually moves to Glasgow, Scotland, as a free woman. Her grandmother, Nancy, accompanies her, first as her slave and then as her maid. Isabella, whose voice was first heard by McCallum, symbolizes feminist empowerment that sheds light on the truth of Jamaica’s history and colonization. Isabella initially passes for white. The poem “Passing” is a detailed encapsulation of the false garb she concocted to deflect her racial and class characterizations[8]:

Isabella is cognizant of how she is perceived and how she perceives herself. She is bold, but wary of sisterhood among her friends who might betray her disguise. It is hard to trust when she knows what she escaped. Though her memory gives way to fiction, the fiction is a fostering of her resilience so that she can survive. Memories are archived through storytelling and reveal the importance of generational sisterhood, as Isabella’s grandmother, Nancy, helps her come to the necessary revelations that free her to grapple with the stories of her ancestors, of her conception, and the question of how she is to shape her life ahead. From a poem of address to her husband to an apostrophe to Burns, Isabella speaks freely, questioning them while simultaneously discovering herself. In the final lines to Burns in “Ae Fond Kiss”, she asks the big question of worth and loss: “for whom / did fortune grieve” [9] It is a question to the colonial Empire: What is its worth? Unlike Burns (who falls ill and does not return to his home), Isabella claims her freedom.

In the poem “Inheritance,” Isabella describes her changed destiny with the help of her grandmother, Nancy. The poem’s form is like a twin cinema, two columns of short lines, but the lines are misaligned to guide its reading from left to right. Grandmother Nancy reveals her mother’s story of being taken across the ocean where her mother’s voice / lost her language / lost each lullaby / swallowed by the sea’s / cavernous din…[10]

McCallum brings Isabella from a life of enslavement on the plantations of Jamaica to the colonial metropolis. With her is a power of creative abstraction with which she “does indeed speak.”[11] WhileBurns’s voice fades away in the second part of the collection, what we read are the images, thoughts, and reflections that belong to Isabella and her grandmother, Nancy. Isabella speaks against the epistemic violence of erasure. In her speaking, she retrieves the usurped episteme that was her Africa, which is most felt in the poem “Voyage”[12]:

Isabella reflects on history, the stories her grandmother shared with her, the immense grief of losing her mother, the “faint reckoning,” and a definitive stance that there is the possibility of recovery from fracture on the voyage of history. This poem serves as a metaphor for triumph through self-reflection and the reclamation of dignity. No Ruined Stone is a collection that insists against the silencing of victims of the colonial empire. Isabella is not only heard in the context of the poems, but she is also audible in the present day as she demonstrates hope that is kindled by her curiosity, persistence, and fearlessness.

McCallum’s active waiting and experiential research in Scotland takes history, archival material, imagination, and her own real-life experiences and finds in them moments of reverie—i.e. sustained slow looking. The intimate, multi-dimensional poems in No Ruined Stone are the result of McCallum’s trust in the aesthetic imagination.

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[1] No Ruined Stone: A Reading and Conversation with Shara McCallum. Clark Forum for Contemporary Issues, October 12, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt7ohx16PL4

[2] Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press, 1999. (p.142)

[3] McCallum, Shara. No Ruined Stone. Alice James Books, 2021. (p.60)

[4] Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press, 1999. (p.170)

[5] McCallum, Shara. No Ruined Stone. Alice James Books, 2021. (p.17)

[6] McCallum, Shara. No Ruined Stone. Alice James Books, 2021. (p.19)

[7] McCallum, Shara. No Ruined Stone. Alice James Books, 2021. (p.60)

[8] McCallum, Shara. No Ruined Stone. Alice James Books, 2021. (p.40)

[9] McCallum, Shara. No Ruined Stone. Alice James Books, 2021. (p.43)

[10] McCallum, Shara. No Ruined Stone. Alice James Books, 2021. (p.45)

[11]Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak? Wedge, 1985.

[12] McCallum, Shara. No Ruined Stone. Alice James Books, 2021. (p.53)

Read more in this issue: Interview | Poems | Writing Prompt

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Rhony Bhopla is a poet, book critic, and visual artist. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, PRISM International, The Hopper, Notre Dame Review, Cherry Moon: Emerging Voices from the Asian Diaspora, The Good Life Review, and the Ekphrastic Review. Her book reviews can be read in Northwest Review and Harvard Review. Her artworks are a regular feature of the Big Names Small Art (BNSA) art auction for the Crocker Art Museum. Rhony is a Kwame Dawes Mapmakers Scholar and was awarded a Mapmakers teaching assistantship at Pacific University. She hosted two Mapmakers Alumni Institute webinars featuring Shivanee Ramlochan, Rajiv Mohabir, and Sudeep Sen on the topic of Global Perspectives: Ecopoetics and Eco-writing. Rhony Bhopla serves as the Vice-President of the Alumni Association Board of Representatives at Pacific University. She is a recipient of a 2023 Fellowship in the Anaphora Arts Emerging Critics Program. She received the Pacific University Alumni Association’s Emerging Leader Award in 2024. She presented her essay “The Blue Clerk: Bhāvika and the Literary Revolution” at the Popular Culture Association’s National Conference in 2022 and at the Furious Flower Conference IV: Celebrating the Worlds of Black Poetry in 2024. She volunteers for the Sacramento Medical Reserve Corps and works as a science educator with Sierra Nevada Journeys. When she is not writing or painting, Rhony enjoys cooking, gardening, and hiking.

By Angel C. Dye

Mahogany L. Browne writes poems for Black girls and women at the intersections. Her poems sing for those of us at the crossroads of knowing and loving ourselves and unpacking the unwanted luggage we are given to define us. She is an award-winning poet, playwright, curator, organizer, and activist—among many other titles. Her work has ranged from writing and editing books to leading poetry organizations to teaching and more. Currently, Browne is Executive Director of JustMedia, described on their website as “a media literacy initiative designed to support the groundwork of criminal justice leaders and community members.” Her recent publications include a young adult novel titled Vinyl Moon, a novel-in-verse titled Chlorine Sky, and a poetry collection titled Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice with Elizabeth Acevedo and Olivia Gatwood. Along with writing and publishing, Browne leads poetry and spoken word programming for an array of organizations. She continues to redefine and demonstrate in real-time what “Black Girl Magic” is and can be. Her popular poem of the same name meditates on the prescriptions that are constantly thrust upon Black girls and women and flips these reductive, uninformed, and often racist, stereotypical boxes on their heads. Though the poem is certainly meant for a “Black Girl” audience, it has also reached audiences far and wide, including on PBS NewsHour’s Brief but Spectacular segment, read by Browne herself back in 2016. That appearance, now archived on YouTube, has amassed 35,000 views from the network’s 4.5 million subscribers and beyond. Browne has performed “Black Girl Magic” for poetry slams and television appearances around the world, and in 2018 it was published as a book by Roaring Brook Press with illustrations by Jess X. Snow.

In “Black Girl Magic,” Browne defines Black Girl Magic as ancestral and enacted through self-definition—it is a flowering that defies all the “ain’ts” aimed at us and that begins to encompass our multitudes. Mahogany L. Browne not only embodies the Black Girl Magic she writes about; she theorizes the ways that this magic ties Black women and girls to a deeper knowledge of themselves and the worldmaking/remaking they do by living unapologetically in an increasingly hostile world.4.5 million subscribers and beyond. Browne has performed “Black Girl Magic” for poetry slams and television appearances around the world, and in 2018 it was published as a book by Roaring Brook Press with illustrations by Jess X. Snow. In the poem, Browne defines Black Girl Magic as ancestral and enacted through self-definition—it is a flowering that defies all the “ain’ts” aimed at us and that begins to encompass our multitudes. Mahogany L. Browne not only embodies the Black Girl Magic she writes about; she theorizes the ways that this magic ties Black women and girls to a deeper knowledge of themselves and the worldmaking/remaking they do by living unapologetically in an increasingly hostile world. 

“Black Girl Magic,” as Browne engages it, is a Black Feminist politics around liberation and purpose. In an interview with tech organization Crescendo, Browne explains, “Black Girl Magic stands for resilience. It is all the ways in which a Black girl, Black woman, Black trans person, Black femme, can be unequivocally unshakeable.” The phrase “#BlackGirlMagic” is a shortened version of the phrase “Black Girls Are Magic,” coined by educator and “cultural pioneer” CaShawn Thompson (@MsCaShawn) on X (formerly Twitter). The phrase gained major traction on social media beginning in 2013 and has since become a mainstay in Black vernacular and beyond, especially in discussions and celebrations of Black girls and women and their achievements and contributions to the world. Thompson drew on her experiences “growing up with her mother, grandmother, and aunts” to create the popular phrase, and Mahogany L. Browne’s writing is an extension of the phrase’s connection to Black girlhood and community. Browne writes: 

The “They” that gives the poem’s litany of prescriptions is unnamed but resoundingly clear. The antagonistic force that Browne’s speaker gestures toward is an amalgamation of people, systems, societal tactics, and expectations that relentlessly mandate who and what Black girls get to be and to what extent they are allowed to be anything. From beauty standards to taking up space to building families, Black girls are constantly policed and punished for living life on their own terms. And what Browne elucidates in her “Black Girl Magic” poem is the truth that while Black girls endure constant battering, they “ain’t posed to have nothing to say” about it unless their responses are entertaining or profitable for their adversaries. They certainly should not voice their pain or displeasure—if they are even allowed to feel it at all. The presupposition in Browne’s repeated “ain’t posed to” is that it is subversive and revolutionary when the “you” in the poem does any of the things she is told she cannot or should not do. According to Browne’s words both on and off the page, embodying Black Girl Magic includes having the freedom to do as a girl or woman pleases, to live unabashedly loudly as herself in whatever forms she decides to. It is impossible to not hear echoes of Sojourner Truth’s famous “Ain’t I A Woman” speech in Mahogany L. Browne’s “ain’ts.” And because Truth’s past “ain’t” and Browne’s present ones are emblematic of intrusive claims about what Black women certainly are not, they resound even more melodically in their reclamation of the magic that we absolutely are. Browne elaborates on the meaning of Black Girl Magic in her Crescendo interview saying, “Your being is unfettered. Your brilliance is un-wavered. Your integrity is unquestioned. You belong in every room you decide to go into.” There is a universality in Browne’s use of “you” and “your” in the interview as well as in the poem that encompasses the vastness of Black girls and women while making space for our individuality and uniqueness. Her meditation on “Black Girl Magic” offers the belief that when we fully embody and act on the magic within us, we are free to be all that we are, wherever and whoever we are. 

Mahogany L. Browne situates herself, her work, and her Black Girl Magic ethos within a tradition of Black Feminist “pillars” who came before her including Ida B. Wells, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Jayne Cortez, and June Jordan. Their works, she explains to Crescendo, guided her toward a deeper understanding of herself and her place in the world. Citing Shange’s often quoted “Where there is woman there is magic” and Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Browne builds on a longstanding politics of Black women’s self-expression to center their lives as important and complex. Shange offers relatedly salient words in her choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf: “i found god in myself & i loved her / i loved her fiercely.” Audre Lorde writes, “My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you,” and “I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.” And June Jordan declares, as Mahogany L. Browne references in her introduction to the Breakbeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic anthology, “I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name / My name is my own my own my own.” Browne joins this chorus of foremothers with “Black Girl Magic,” a potent elixir that has been brewing in her bloodline and those of her poetic predecessors for decades. Keenly aware of this, Browne uses her poem to acknowledge the ways that Black girls possess a deep inner knowledge about who they are and what they are capable of: 

The speaker of the poem justifies the serial “ain’ts” preceding these two stanzas with more “ain’ts,” more echoed prescriptions of what Black girls should not do. The intrusive outside voice proclaims that someone like “you” should not love themselves or find their voice or find beauty in their complexion or see themselves in exemplars like Nina Simone, Beyoncé, Tina Turner, Cecily Tyson, or Shonda Rhimes. What this voice is really saying is that Black girls and women should not be proud of their beauty or intelligence. They should not have the capacity for caring and nurturing—especially since they themselves should not be cared for or nurtured—and they should not be adored or admired. But Mahogany L. Browne does admire and adore us.  

Browne demonstrates her fervent commitment to loving “up on” us not just with her poetry but also with her work as a mentor, educator, and founder of initiatives like the Woke Baby Book Fair for diverse literature, which she organized while serving as the Lincoln Center Poet-in-Residence in 2021. This event was part of a slate of public facing programs that Browne led promoting art, literacy, and justice with the call to action “We Are the Work.” Browne uses her art to uplift and inspire families and communities in true Black Girl Magic fashion. She continues to work across media, having released an album with Sean Mason titled CHROME VALLEY in 2024, an album titled I Remember Death by Its Proximity to What I Love in 2022, a series of young adult books (which have been adapted for stage), children’s books, poetry collections, visuals, and more. She defies every “ain’t” in “Black Girl Magic” by applying her own magic to her artistic practice and by loving up on herself while letting us inside her mind. 

“Black Girl Magic” is resonant because it is at once a proclamation, an affirmation, and a reclamation. In the Breakbeat Poets Vol. 2 introduction, Browne asks repeatedly, “Where in the world do they love a Black girl for being herself?” She answers this provocation with an anecdote about her sister-in-law “T,” who she says is what people might call a “‘firecracker.’” Instead of agreeing with this assessment of her sister-in-law as a volatile, boisterous woman, she writes about how she sees her as vibrant and dynamic. From her own journey of being called too much and too loud, and being told she takes up too much space, Browne is able to recognize the gift in her sister-in-law’s outspoken, unapologetic personality. She encourages T to continue speaking up—responsibly and considerately—and to never internalize the “folktale” that she is somehow “hard to love” because it is the same affirmation she has had to give herself. Browne reclaims Black women’s voices as our own and projects them even louder into the atmosphere. She writes, “A Black woman is often asked to lead (silently), to be the symbol of civility while everyone else plays from a different playbook, mocking her existence the entire time.” This sobering truth about the ways we are silenced is a reverberation of the “ain’t” stream in “Black Girl Magic.” The poem lingers on the cultural and societal burdens Black women are expected to “carry” including “babies…weaves…felons…families…confusion…silence…a nation,” and it emphasizes the one thing we are “never” permitted to carry: “an opinion” (13-17). The words in “Black Girl Magic” read as a careful acknowledgement of the prescriptions that “T,” Browne, and so many of us are at odds with by just being. Our one salvation is that, in answer to Browne’s question, the place in the world where we are loved for being ourselves is in the pages of her writing and the praxis of her activism. 

After all the opposition and the seemingly never-ending stream of prescriptions and “ain’t posed tos” that Mahogany L. Browne lays out in “Black Girl Magic,” there is a shift driven by Black girls’ voices, minds, and beauty. The poem’s volta appears beginning with a line that starts, “But you tell them…” It could end there because this conjunction and reframe moves the external, imposing voice that has been telling “you” what not to do and who not to be from the center to the margins. The line places “you” in charge of speaking and deciding, continuing on to say, “you are more than a hot comb and a wash and set / You are Kunta Kinte’s kin / You are a Black Girl worth remembering” (Browne 29). Referencing the semiautobiographical neo-slave narrative turned television miniseries Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley, Mahogany L. Browne’s speaker clarifies that the “you” who has been silenced and devalued is descended from African ancestors who are rich in culture and history. She is living, breathing history herself, even while fortifying herself against everyone’s demands of her. She is memorable. 

Two final stanzas introduced with conjunctions close out the poem. In these stanzas, the speaker’s language shifts again to juxtapose the earlier list of serial “you ain’t posed to” and “you posed to” prescriptions. Nothing about Black girls’ identities is abstract or prescriptive in these lines. Instead, our personhood, power, and magic are definitive and fully realized: 

The language in these final lines changes into declarative statements and then into outright absolutes. “You are,” “You are,” “You are” becomes just “You” and a “black girl” attribute. These vernacular movements signal a confidence and pride in the “black girl” who is described. The speaker has gone from telling their Black girl audience who they are being told they are allowed to be to telling them who they truly are. Ultimately, the speaker’s insistence on who Black girls “are” wanes in the abandonment of the word “are” leading to an openness that lets them “bloom” into anything they want to become. The confirmations in the poem drown out the outside voices until the only ones “black girl black girl” maturing into “black woman” can hear are her own and those of the Black women cheering her on. We see her and admire her with “OUR eyes.” There is a collectivity and heft to the capitalization of “OUR” that underscores just how many of us there are and how much more our gaze, the gaze of her peers, matters than anyone else’s. We are not just watching her; we are witnessing her. We are holding space for her and loving who we see. We see ourselves reflected in her eyes the same way that we create a space nurturing enough for her to see herself reflected in ours. 

Mahogany L. Browne’s theorization of Black girlhood and womanhood in her poem “Black Girl Magic” is representative of her vast oeuvre as an artist, educator, and activist. What she manages to capture in the poem is what she lives out through her engagements with the communities she builds and sustains. As a fierce advocate for Black women’s wellness in all forms, she recognizes the liberatory power of self-expression. Unafraid to name the ways that we are bombarded with misnomers and narrow categories, her words roar louder than any voices attempting to tell us who we are and what we can be. Browne says it best in Breakbeat Poets Vol. 2: “We are so easy to love. Our resilience and expansion are proof that magic exists. We are magic. We are Black girls grown into women, growing men and women…” Mahogany L. Browne is certainly magic, but she is also a careful magician whose linguistic and cultural alchemy helps us Black girls better know and love ourselves.  

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Works Cited 

“Audre Lorde’s The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (1977).” Buried In Print, 2 Nov. 2022, http://www.buriedinprint.com/audre-lordes-the-transformation-of-silence-into-language-and-action-1977/. 

“Bio.” MAHOGANY L. BROWNE, mobrowne.com/bio.html. 

Browne, Mahogany L. A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe. Crown Books for Young Readers, 2025. 

——— . Black Girl Magic: A Poem. Roaring Brook Press, 2018. 

CaShawn Thompson – The Mother of #BlackGirlMagic, cashawn.com/. 

Haley, Alex. Roots: The Saga of An American Family. Dell Publishing Company, 1977.  

Jordan, June. “Poem About My Rights.” The Poetry Foundation, 31 Oct. 2023, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/161357/poem-about-my-rights-651df23f84683. 

“Mahogany L. Browne Reads “Black Girl Magic”.” The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, http://www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org/poems/black-girl-magic. 

“Mahogany L. Browne: Healing, Organizing, Parenting and the Movement for Black Lives.” Crescendo, crescendowork.com/mahogany-l-browne-healing-organizing-parenting-movement-for-black-lives. 

Mahogany L. Browne, http://www.mahoganylbrowne.com/. 

“Mahogany L. Browne.” UNSSC | United Nations System Staff College, http://www.unssc.org/about-unssc/speakers-and-collaborators/mahogany-l-browne. 

PBS NewsHour. “Poet Mahogany L. Browne on ‘black girl magic’.” YouTube, 25 Feb. 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ4CPUufrIQ. 

Shange, Ntozake. for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. Simon & Schuster, 2010. 

Truth, Sojourner. “Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I A Woman? (U.S. National Park Service).” NPS.gov (U.S. National Park Service), 17 Nov. 2017, http://www.nps.gov/articles/sojourner-truth.htm. 

Jamila Woods, et al. The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic. Haymarket Books, 2018. EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=569d13e1-1be9-3fab-8a61-c2566ee24a63. 

“Woke Baby Book Fair · Lincoln Center.” Lincoln Center, July 2021, www.lincolncenter.org/lincoln-center-at-home/show/woke-baby-book-fairandnbsp. 

Read more in this issue: Interview | Poems | Writing Prompt

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Angel C. Dye (she/her) is a poet, researcher, and author of two chapbooks: BREATHE and My Mouth a Constant Prayer. Angel is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin/Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas. A graduate of Howard University, she also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Kentucky. Her work has appeared in publications such as Callaloo and the Langston Hughes Review, among others. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at Rutgers, writing on the rent party phenomenon in Harlem Renaissance literature and culture. She aims to discover, as Audre Lorde explains, “the words [she does] not yet have.”

By A. H. Jerriod Avant, PhD

It was near my final semester or so of my first MFA in Louisville, Kentucky maybe twelve or so years ago when I encountered the work of Shane McCrae in the form of Shane McCrae himself. He was the visiting faculty during Spalding University’s Low-Res MFA program. While hearing him read I thought, What is he sayin’ and why does it feel good to hear him say it how he sayin’ it?  This was in 2012 and Mule had not been out a year or not for long. Each of us who sat in his workshop was there to try and find a path to carve our own voices and here McCrae was, his modes in hand and light-years ahead, carving distinct voices, weaving personal history and family through a metricist’s lens. To read and hear a voice who’s been denied truth in the ways McCrae names and remembers is soul -stirring and makes an impeccable argument for a life disturbed by family, being torn from his Black father and, in a way, Blackness, and the complications of identity and belonging that come along with that. McCrae’s lean toward metrics isn’t solely responsible for how hefty the work is, but it does give McCrae a kind of grid from which his poems come etched.   

The poems in Mule carry with them an innovative use of meter. Convention is over in McCrae’s metrical constellation. Breaking away from traditional means of writing in metrical forms, and instead, the poet works to reflect the fragmented and rather multifaceted nature of the African American experience. What Black tongue hasn’t been broken? What Black path to anything has been linear? What Black family hasn’t been torn apart variously and relentlessly? McCrae’s been generous with details of his interior life including the story of his kidnapping, the huge part race plays into that, and finding a way back to his Blackness and his father after being ripped away from them at an age the mind can be so easily molded.   

As the mind can be molded, so can language, and is able to be configured endlessly, especially when we think of language as matter, as a physical thing that can be pushed around and arranged to our aesthetic bends. This feels like the modus operandi of the poet, Shane McCrae, whose belief in the “infinite possibilities” of writing in meter, keep him interested and dialed into the practice. Meter, or the marks, rules and limits that govern it, can become an indispensable tenet of a craftsperson’s practice, a kind of toolshed for shaping and carving out a voice, a feeling, a mood, a space, or a poem built less to communicate a thing and more so, to imagine, explore and maybe arrive somewhere new, necessary, or interesting. McCrae’s work lands me in new places often, given my penchant for sound, rhythm and the vast number of cadences available to those who live in the metrics of poetry. 

A unique feature of McCrae’s metrical deployment is the way two lines can sometimes form one or one and a half (if we read McCrae’s forward slashes within the line as indication of a metrical line break). This can be useful if the poet has identified the meter the poem wants to be written in. It can keep you on track with your foot count and give you a sense of how long your lines are. It doesn’t feel as if the breaks are a disturbance to the rhythm or the metrics of the line have on the poem or on what we hear, if anything it reinforces a set pattern the poet can use to build, break, riff or otherwise work from as the poem carries on.  Here, in the first stanza of “The Cardinal is the Marriage Bird” McCrae has given us all of this and more. It reads (with the metrics as I sounded it out. I generally don’t pronounce the “i” in cardinal): 

The poem is written in nearly all iambs. The first line of this stanza reads as iambic tetrameter (4 pairs of iambs) but is followed by an additional 3 pair of iambs after the metrical line break, bird /.  This sets the tone for McCrae to construct complementary rhythms next. The iambs clear the way for the meter to vary from phrase to phrase or line to line and provide a stable base for the poet to come back to and re-establish it, if need be. Writing in iambs is sing-songy enough to carry itself but with some well-planned timing and a musical enough ear, iambs can be enhanced by our natural speaking cadences and their linguistic features. The decision to break the second line with an enjambed dusk makes the second marginal line (from margin to margin, not metrical line) sway back and forth in a different way given the pauses at the caesura (space) and the metrical line break, then ending on an unstressed syllable, -dy, which feels like a kind of softening offered by the falling meter that line ends with. This puts the 3^rd marginal line, with its anapestic feet, in the position to offer up a series of sonic treats, of the card-, in the sun-, in the day. Anapestic and dactylic feet often remind me of triplets in music, where 3 musical notes are played within the timeframe of 1 beat in a measure where each measure consists of 4 beats. Generally, three anapestic feet in a row would sound intense, especially if the poem continues that rhythmic path, but given the metrical terrain of the poem, the anapestic song is wondrous and balanced amongst the many iambs that account for the bulk of the stanza.  

In another poem in the series of marriage poems in Mule, “We Married in The Front Yard,”, McCrae digs into this repetitive, emotionally charged passage, that seems to mimic the uneasiness and heartbreak baked into the subject matter. These are highly rhythmic portions of the poem and seem to feed the poem’s emotional and glitchy core. Centered in the poem is a marriage, a son,  and the developmental disorder taking hold. McCrae points directly to this when he says: “… we watched him disappear / gesture by gesture    word by word his au- / tism slowly    erasing him he couldn’t catch /.” It’s heartbreaking to watch a loved one’s faculties fall away, especially (I imagine) before those faculties are even fully developed in a child. These three lines do much work to mimic that falling away occurring in the child. The breakage that happens from phrase to phrase signals a kind of disappearing/coming apart. The way “gesture by gesture” and “word by word” are both balanced and rhythmic in their palindromic construction, feels analogous to the back-and-forth nature of a parent and child playing catch. The exchanges in an activity as such are undeniably rhythmic and functions on a pattern that seeps through McCrae’s lines. The severing and enjambment of “au- / tism” is part symbolic and part metric as McCrae decides to end the line with this rising meter, so that the next line begins with“tism slowly”, a pair of trochees that swing so easily you don’t even realize they’ve swung.  

But trochees, guilty of their falling meter, have this effect and in this case, act as a foreshadowing metric for what feels dizzying a few lines later in the poem. It’s stunning how much McCrae’s arrangement sounds like and seems to mimic the actions referenced, and the unsuccess of them. This portion reads:  

Again, with iambs percolating through, McCrae weaves music and cuts into an emotive sway that can be felt as it is read or heard if spoken aloud. A difficult passage that points to the steady trying, over and over, again and again, instructing the young child earnestly, to “catch”. This passage begins with a trochee and a spondee “Part to let go” which I read as, Dum-da Dum-Dum. Counting on a consistent number of beats per line and each line ending in a stressed beat, the poet knows what space and time he has to make the music he wants. He has a map that guides his decisions into fruition. The irregular trochee and spondee at the beginning of the passage, work in tandem with the caesura after “The ball again we said …” and the caesura before “catch.”  There are cracks and empty spaces here. It seems the rhythm of the action being referenced, its back-and-forth, swaying operation, are baked into the meter and then broken up so that there’s a sense of instability, but the rhythm is benefitting from the pause and thus we get this music that seems to bury us emotionally in what McCrae has been so generous in offering.  

McCrae’s use of meter is not rigid, mechanical or exacting. The metrical variations in his work reflect the poem’s emotional nuances. Sometimes there’s a trochee at the beginning of a line, meant to create a sense of urgency or disruption. These variations prevent the meter from becoming monotonous and add a layer of complexity to the poem’s sound and meaning. Additionally, McCrae’s syntax and enjambment play crucial roles in the poem’s metrics. By breaking lines in unexpected places, he creates a sense of movement and fluidity, mirroring perhaps, the flight of the cardinal. He’s manipulating the poem’s pacing, drawing attention to certain moments and enhancing the overall impact of the poem. 

***** 

Much of what I love about McCrae’s work lies in the tone and desires in the underpinned captives speaking in his poems. It feels like you’re eavesdropping on a conversation where someone has had an upper hand for far too long and the jig is finally up. The level of surety, and observation brought to these voices is piercing and resonates deeply given how democratizing language can be in a field like poetry. Imagine listening to an enslaved African American speaking to their enslaver in the meter and diction McCrae provides for Jim Limber.  

It is a rousing treat to experience In the Language of My Captor and all the racial, historical balancing, setting straight and probing into the minds and interior spaces of the captor and the captive, it does. Sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t be listening, like I’ve tapped a private, unequal phoneline between the two. I want to think about how concise and penetrable Jim Limber’s voice is. For certain readers, I imagine it may be unnerving or even frightening to read. I believe if I came from a long line of captors, hearing Jim Limber’s voice according to McCrae, might unsettle me. The book opens with a series of themed scenarios that move from the captor’s God and the captive’s God not being the same God, to the savagery of the panopticon and its ideas, to what privacy might truly mean or not in hostile quarters like these, to shame and a captor crying in his hands to his captive who justly expresses no pity for him and the lack of shame inside him. Given McCrae’s own kidnapping and captivity, he unfortunately has insider knowledge of the emotional landscape one must face in a circumstance as racially charged and motivated as both his and Limber’s. In a poem much later in the book, titled “[hope][lessness],” Jim ponders the ways the relationship between he and his captor affects him, specifically the hopelessness of the relationship which feels more parasitic than it does symbiotic; not one person goes unharmed, even the captor who might believe himself to be unharmed. A portion of the poem reads:

This reads like the dialogue of a period film set in the antebellum south, except the captive’s language is giving the captor’s language a run for its blood and cotton money. McCrae deviates from the regular iambic metric of the map and has enjambed lines so that we get truths inside each single line and truths from the accumulation of them. In the first stanza, we learn about four different truths about the captor, and this forged relationship. The effect of adding a portion of a metrical line to another metrical line not only changes the rhythm of that line but the following line as well. McCrae is assigning parameters for his lines. Like redistricting, which can change the area of the map a politician may cover, certain metrical lines in McCrae’s have their own line, while other metrical lines must share the line, the way a district line within a county or state might split a town or city where candidates share voters in one town but may have all the voters to themselves in other towns. It’s an important distinction given either scenario. This offers McCrae the opportunity to break up the monotony of the iambs and thus, the monotony of white supremacist thinking and activity. The fourth line, “Expression    of his hopelessness // /My kind” reinforces the mirror held up to the captor. That what he thinks and feels about his captive, is more so a reflection of what he lacks and feels about himself. It points not only to his captive but those like Jim Limber. The poem continues: 

The retributive tone and language are palpable and feel tremendously achievable inside the world of the poem and almost outside of it. There’s this feeling created by enjambment and stacked lines (what I’m calling two or more metrical lines sharing a marginal line) that feels slippery—the captor and the captive seem to speak simultaneously through the poem. Limber knows his captor intimately enough that they share the same language and sometimes have the same thoughts except one is cloaked in a kind of paranoia and the other a kind of fuel for it. The , “How could he    / Free me / And not fear I / Would seek revenge    / He says”  we see the anxiety of the captor and I think, a truth and wish for Jim Limber. The way the years of captivity have bred this attitude in Limber is fiery. McCrae get us as close to the heat as he can. The calm, quiet, mostly monosyllabic words also give Jim a concise, eerie, and focused tone, unwavering in its pursuit of revenge. Lastly, it is not beyond the captor’s knowledge that what he has caused is as evil as Jim tells us it is. That it is as selfish and disruptive as the consequences and longevity of it all.  In the lines, “/ He says / he keeps me here / because he would if he were / Me seek revenge” we find glaring evidence in this confession, which is not a characteristic I would typically associate with white supremacist activity, this confessing out loud of the damage and violence at their hands. Sure, they know it and think it, and say privately to each other perhaps, how fucked up what they do is, but in this way, I think it rare. Feels incomplete here. But in the poem… or but McCrae forces the confession in perfect unforced clarity… or something to close out the thought.

***** 

Ain’t no sidewalls or guardrails in McCrae’s sonnets. He’s taken them off and thus, gotten rid of what felt like hard walls on both sides of the sonnet; the strict rhyme schemes and hard and strict syllable counts have felt more mechanic than human, more programmed than fluid and freely moving. Reading various sonnet brands has taught me that quirks and idiosyncrasies often mark the differences in received forms of any kind. We don’t get the Miltonic sonnet without the two structural tweaks and the switch in subject matter Milton makes to the Spenserian sonnet. So how McCraen to include more than one metrical line in a marginal line of a poem and mark it. What a McCraen move to lean into ending and beginning lines with irregular stresses, contrary to what the type of feet the metrical map is dominated by. McCrae’s knowledge of and instincts for meter enhance the emotional depth of his poems while weaving personal, familial, and sweeping details of a Black interior life, in the face of so much that still feeds off it.  

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Works Cited 

McCrae, Shane. Mule. CSU Poetry Center Books, 2010.

McCrae, Shane. In the Language of My Captor. Wesleyan University Press, 2017.

Read more in this issue: Interview | Poems | Writing Prompt

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A. H. Jerriod Avant was born and raised in Longtown, Mississippi. His first book, Muscadine (2023), received the 2024 Mississippi Institute of the Arts and Letters Poetry Award. A graduate of Jackson State University, Avant has earned MFA degrees from Spalding University and New York University. A graduate of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, he’s received scholarships from the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference and Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program. Avant has received two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and an emerging artist grant from the St. Botolph Club Foundation. His work has appeared in the Boston Review, Pinwheel, Callaloo, Virginia Quarterly Review, Obsidian, The Yale Review, among other journals, and has been produced in collaboration with the Emily Harvey Foundation, the Highline NYC, and the Kitchen Lab. Avant is the 2024-2025 John and Renee Grisham Writer-In-Residence at the University of Mississippi.  

By Carmin Wong

Black diaspora is at once about particular locations (actual and imagined); roots/uprooting (principally understood as from Africa, but just as much to and within Africa, in other cases); and routes that bodies, ideas, and texts travel. By diaspora, we refer to these conditions of movement and emplacement, and to processes of (dis)identification, but also to relationality, as Jacqueline Nassy Brown points out. Commentators often miss this vital piece. 
— Jafari S. Allen 

A Caribbean exists in the public imagination.  

In this imagination, it is a land of visually aesthetic, incandescent beaches, suns that peak over volcanic mountains, a place where rupture only happens in shady breezeways. It is a market manicured by tourism, far-away vacation homes, brochures accessorized with words like “escape” and “paradise.” Somewhere under closed eyelids, thick bushes of grass graze the sworded hands of market-people, who by day, offer thinly sliced mangos rubbed in salt and pepper sauce. There are coconuts everywhere, there are mouths, but hunger is distant.   

In this imagination, residence is temporary — an annual act of visitation. Memories of colonial history, settlement, and confinement are hidden along the passageway from white picket fence to sandy shores. Time does not pass; for Mother Earth holds still the Caribbean.  

In this imagination, the Caribbean is not a daughter of empire or a son of war.  

Her tongue, more vibrant than mutiny. 

Despite the seasonal hideaways, a parallel reality exists. The Caribbean is both a physical place and a metaphysical space. Alive, awakened, and actualized, it holds culture, kinship across borders — where people practice Creole languages across extended households, play with talking drums and songs out of fossil memory, and ink, and old-age amber. A diaspora formed by that which could not be sold away or tossed overboard. 

People tie garments around their heads, their bodies carrying stories within ancestral dances. 

The Caribbean for Caribbeans — both located geographically and elsewhere — is a paradox. A reckoning of oneself, one’s land, one’s nationhood as both a subject of a colonial past and a lawless, unshackled path to freedom.  

This Caribbean is interspatial, cosmic, and Earthly.  

It is both then and now—and will be. It is both now and future. 

It is cloak and refuge. It is fiyah and watah.

It is a universe of stories brought back from dust. 

Poet Samantha Thornhill meditates on these intersections, the ruptures of here and before, explaining both the temporality of one’s homeland and the urgency of memory in her collection The Animated Universe. Harkening back to the collection’s title, her poems animate and enliven the varied experiences of Caribbean life. Whether poems are set in Trinidad or the United States the speakers in each piece illuminate Caribbean history as a past in motion, unshackling itself from the idea of an end. Infinite possibility is present in each piece, as she dreams ideas of freedom and provides a critical view of how western ideals have masked the true culture of the Caribbean.   

In her poem, “Origin (After N. Marin),” Thornhill illustrates one of the violent wreckages of colonialism — that is, the enforcement of a linear time, a preconceived beginning — by challenging, what is (the time) of the Black Diaspora. As the poem opens, she writes: 

Here Thornhill summons an answer to the predetermined demarcations of time — and of African diasporic people’s relationships to time — by proposing a different way to understand one’s origin as not from a beginning but from the “Bend. Break. Mend.” of oneself (10). By the end of this poem, the third in this collection, the speaker’s temporality and acceptance of their own ontology has grown in their recollection. In the final lines, the speaker interrogates their own origin by saying “ Accrue. Forget / to remember myself / again. Born” (10). 

Here, to be born is to experience return, over and over again. It is a process of renewal and the mending of time, to liberate the soul from the physicality of a defined beginning. Moreover, this alignment centers on African values that call into being the circle of life. Life is not to be destroyed; it begins anew, again. 

Throughout this collection, Thornhill gives readers the language to think about a myriad of intimate and infinite moments that cluster our lives, and ultimately, assure us that we are our own universe. She reminds us that power is both spirit and system, it is the cosmic energy within us and in relation to the realities of the outside world. If the demand of colonial power mythologizes us as inferior — if the Caribbean is seen only through the lens of its conquest — how can we affirm our power, as stars do in the galaxy, to combust from this state of othering? How do we release ourselves from a Western center and return to a nebula of our creation?  

In the poem, “Elegy for Wishbones (for Dapo),” Thornhill evokes the body as a vessel that holds memory. She writes: 

In this part of the poem, she laments the tragedy of violence enacted on the flesh while also grappling with the speaker’s autonomy to grieve, digest, and assert their own power. Power becomes a form of self-actualization, a desire to “unleash / [one’s] most enlightened parts” (63). Through heavy imagery and alliteration, this poem makes visible the invisible space between reality and possibility, as the speaker ruminates over historical carnage and its influence over present circumstances, mobility, and access. 

Towards the end of her collection, poems such as “On First Hearing A Child Call You Old” and “Ancestor” offer another linkage between life and death. Thornhill reminds us that human connection is also tethered to spiritual connection, which transcends the bonds of flesh and transports audiences, again, across time. Situated only a few poems apart, these two poems spark an inter-generational and spirited conversation across the page, just as light travels between galaxies.  

In the poem, “On First Hearing A Child Call You Old,” the speaker understands “birth as a mere / widening of mouths, and death divine tectonics” placing the natural movement and evolution of one’s life — that is, aging — a sacred experience not apart from the youngness of birth (78). The speaker’s wit across the first seven stanzas displays comedic discontent between this new “insurrection,” the immortality associated with the fading illusion of youth, while the final stanza reveals the peace they have come to know: death is but a state of moving on. This is furthered by the voice of the ancestor in the second poem, who speaks from the point of ascension. The speaker animates this experience saying:  

The speaker of the poem conjures a familial past to comfort her in the present. The ancestor reminds her of the power of dreaming, for that is enough to resurrect histories, cultures, and people, and breathe new life across generations.  

One of Thornhill’s greatest strengths lies in her ability to conceal her speakers’ motives while forging stories of ownership and calls to action. Her carefulness of language, hidden messages, and oral style evokes diasporic traditions of insurrection from the plantation to thereafter, and in doing so, offer an idea about what freedom can mean or look like from within. Even in the cover of her book, Thornhill veils the image of new life — an image of a newborn baby made from a constellation of stars — behind the collection’s title. This sentiment is projected across her poems, whether they touch on the rhyme and rhythm of Caribbean music or Black families and kinship, she reminds us that there is infinite life to be gleaned in the pursuit of both restoring what has been stolen and sitting with what remains.   

This debut collection reflects Thornhill’s voice as a seasoned writer, spoken word artist, and performer, as she seamlessly positions herself in a tradition of decolonial worldmaking. Using her poetry to participate in creative theoretic approaches to Black freedom struggles, she evokes introspection while exploring the complexities of identity and belonging for African peoples across the Caribbean diaspora. The Animated Universe becomes a poetic cartography navigating us towards a formation of freedom that reminds us of the divine power within.  

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Works Cited 

Allen, Jafari S. “Black/Queer/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 18 no. 2, 2012, p. 211-248, doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1472872. 

Thornhill, Samantha. The Animated Universe. Peepal Tree Press, 2022. 

Read more in this issue: Interview | Poems | Writing Prompt

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Carmin Wong is a poet, playwright, and scholar whose poems and plays have earned her much recognition. She has been awarded grants by Poets & Writers and Jeremy O. Harris and The Bushwick Starr. She has received fellowships from The Watering Hole, Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers (IRT) at Phillips Academy — Andover, and the Cooper-DuBois Mentoring program at Penn State. Wong’s recent research has been supported with a grant from the Africana Research Center at Penn State. Her work has been featured on WRBH: Radio for the Blind & Handicapped, Obsidian, The Quarry, Sou’wester, Xavier Review, Antenna.Works, and elsewhere. She is the co-author of A Chorus Within Her, produced by Theater Alliance, co-founder of Carmin and Aye’s Prom Giveaway, and founder of Feed Those Without Shelter in NYC. Wong is currently pursuing a dual-title PhD in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Penn State.

By Gbenga Adesina, PhD

Let us begin with the flowers, spices, seeds, fruits, and trees—guavas, hibiscus, crocus, mangoes, jasmine, pomegranate, nutmeg, date palms, rice, dill, magnolia, coffee seeds, onions, eggplant, castor beans, corn cobs, ginger among others—which in Safia Elhillo’s poetry, across three expansive books, published over a span of six years, and translated into several languages, are allegorical insignia of a dismantled paradise.  

Her language, or better still, a third kind of utterance emerges at the interstice and border of the tongue where her various languages collide and leave bright, mournful shards in their wake. She’s adroit at allowing the gaps to speak, but this grammar of rupture, we must believe, is not merely aesthetic but an ethical and political philosophy; for her poetry, polyphonic by design—choral, propulsive, lyrical, and liturgical—is a poetry that could only have been written in the wake of a vanished Eden. In this post-Eden, the mouth of Adam, we sense, is clogged with shame and brokenness, and only the daughters are left to tell the tale. This shame is a manifest prognosis of postcolonial disquiet, a condition in those who have suffered forced exile and multiple evictions occasioned by war and neocolonial violence as Elhillo’s people have. Her parents fled Sudan in the 80’s. Since 1983, when a civil war, in the wake of British colonization, started between a tyrannous central government and resistance groups in a clash of cultural and religious affiliations, and disparate peoples forced into a suffocating and inorganic national project, over two million Sudanese have died and over 4 million people have been displaced. What the poet has done with this disquiet, though, is transform it through poetry—with swagger, style, verbal elan, and urgency—into psalms of restored lineage. Restoration and return, however, are inexhaustible projects, perpetual and unfinished, cyclic, unending.  

Within this theory of a lost paradise—a theory in which the yield of the land is used through fractured memory to create lyric and narrative landscapes having been ejected from the actual land—we might start to understand the vegetal imageries Elhillo strategically deploys in her poems as the pursuit of an ecological epistemology. In this epistemology of seeds, spice, and flowers, knowledge accrues from sensory data grounded in ecological details and retrieval of scenes from past lives through mythic reconstructions prompted by the natural world. Her poems thus serve as sensory recovery maps, sewn from fruits, trees, and spices, for her people, seeds of dispersal across geographies. For the sake of this analysis, I shall consider three of her poems, one from her first book of poems, January Children, and two from her latest offering, Girls That Never Die. 

Consider the poem “first adornment”:  

In this poem, we are immediately situated in a holy, festive season and the togetherness of extended family under the auspice of such festivity. It is a time that functions not by clock but by belonging. This landmark of time is poignant as it attenuates the temporal orphaning Mohamed Mbougar Sarr tells us in The Most Secret Memory of Men is the destiny of those dispossessed of their land. The catastrophe of dislocation, the violent urgency of dispersal, the exilic exodus become the only markers of time expected to be worthy of memorial, but here Elhillo subverts that expectation and retrieves a time in which her subjects exist in a communal rhythm and drama of assemblage in oppositional affirmation against dispersion.  

The title, “first adornment,” and the first line of the poem, “it’s ramadan i’m nine years old” position us at the cusp of a child’s ritual passage. We intuit that adornment is the final drama of the poem. From the Latin root word adornare the inflected form of adorno which means to “endow” to “prepare” to “embellish.” To be “robed” in a garment or dress, but also, we suspect adornment could be interpreted as in to be “robed” in the garment of history, to be wrapped in the ritual cloth and weight of family legacy. This doubleness of “adornment” allows us an entry into the elegiac intelligence of the poem.  

The “ramadan” festive assemblage of kin in this poem is configured as a private paradise. We see how their rituals form an ecology of belonging around a child’s fragile inner world. She shyly observes the adults and intuits that she belongs to them, and she is therefore an inheritor of their beauty, which is “bright & beaded” but also difficult, “burnt” and “biglegged.” Part of their difficult beauty is dislocation, separate as they are from their “lost” or “sleeping” men. At the edge of the tableau is a sensitive child, lips darkened red by juice from crushed hibiscus, overwhelmed, though she cannot yet name it, by anticipatory grief. Like any paradise, this one is delicately cobbled together by a fraying glue. The paradise, the child suspects as we do, is on the verge of disintegration. 

The imagery of “crushed & stained hibiscus      it darkens / my lips a bitten red” performs two interpretive functions: first, it signifies the innocent sensory delight of childhood and is therefore a temporal marker; and secondly, it simultaneously serves as a rupture of that season of innocence. For immediately, the young speaker’s lips are darkened by crushed hibiscus. She looks and suddenly beholds herself and perhaps her future in the mirrored reflections of genetic and morphological archetypes of her family tree arrayed before her by her aunts. There is a foreknowing, the elegiac intelligence. It manifests as a caesura, an uncanny rupture signified by the white space between the word “red” and the phrase “& i / think” as if to dramatize the breakage of her innocence as she comes into an awareness of her heavy family legacy. We receive the imagery of hibiscus in the poem as a simulacrum of the fruit of the knowledge of history. If this has Edenic echoes, it is because we are hewing close to the paradisal allusions on which this analysis is premised. The colorfulness of the crushed hibiscus mirrors the bright and beaded scarves, though the scarves mask heaviness. We observe and follow along as the young speaker looks out of the cocoon of innocence into the lives of her aunts and beholds the reality of exodus that marks their family lives (“their men lost or upstairs sleeping or gone / to america to look for work / gone to england / to saudi arabia to the emirates to look for work”).  

Is this what awaits her? she asks, or is this what has spawned her, this cyclic dispersal? Moreover, the hibiscus survives and has survived for thousands of years through the evolutionary intelligence of dispersal. Creatures of flights—birds, bees, and butterflies—carry their seeds and deliver them to continents. The poet glimpses this exilic condition, which is both her reality and her future and, in that moment, she crosses from innocence to elegiac knowledge with the fruit as the sensory door of passage.   

If these ecological significations are subtle in Elhillo’s first collections of poems, January Children, they assume a central and maturely distilled role in her sophomore and latest book of poems, Girls That Never Die. Consider the poem, “Pomegranate with Partial Nude”: 

The declarative first line of this poem is a signaling toward rootedness. From the adolescent uncertainty of “i think i look like my big legged aunties” of the previous poem, we sensed a bridge has been crossed to the grounded-ness of “i know my history.” In this poem, we are in a nebulous and unnamed location, yes, but spatially, Elhillo’s poems are situated in a polyphony of cities, countries, and continents, though these elsewheres are haunted always by Sudan which in this poem returns to us as “my garden city.” The flight of the poet’s parents in the 80s from Sudan through multiple cities and countries across years before settling in the United States and her own subsequent cycle of flights and returns form a thematic island chain of exile within exile—a cyclic temporality of childhood, rupture as place, and home as a kinetic dwelling. In her work and in these dizzying cartographies of movements, the ecological imageries serve as fluorescent landmarks which calibrate time and seasons and serve as repositories of private epiphanies and communal memory.  

The line “pomegranate in my throat” is particularly jarring as an ecological insignia. The imagery lands with a haunting tactility. It recalls “my lips, a bitten red” from the previous poem, but where “lips” are external or peripheral to the body, the “throat” is internal signifying the inseparability of her home from her body. Here, home is totemized by the absorbed smell of a fruit, an ecological signifier. If “my lips, a bitten red” was immediately followed by “i / think I look like my biglegged aunts” in the previous poem, “pomegranate in my throat” in this poem is immediately followed by “color of all my sisters” thus continuing the matrilineal lineage of Elhillo’s poems. This lineage has a resonant ecological parallel. Pomegranate trees are either male trees or trees with both male and female sexual characters. The male trees produce trumpet-like flowers but not fruits. In the pomegranate trees with both anthers (the male feature) and stigma (the female feature) which contains the ovary, a pollinating agent such as a bee transfers the pistil from the male to the female where fruits grow in a cluster of sisters. This image returns us back to Elhillo’s “color of my sisters.” The sisters, like the fruits, are a cluster or a chorus, as in the choruses of the epic Greeks or those of the contemporary Blues. 

The concluding lines are particularly resonant for their ecological signification:  

In these lines, fruits and seeds elegize rupture, dispersal, dislocation, and disappearance so achingly. The lines singe: “their names peeled & sucked / their names spit like seeds from car windows.” This is not sensuous pollination, this is forced eviction, bruising dispersion. The vegetal images simultaneously serve as the poet’s metaphorizing tool for the inalienable and sensuous diffusion of home into her deepest parts (“pomegranate in my throat”) and as the totem of forced ejections from that home (“spit like seeds from car windows”). Moreover, the word “rupture” proves her rupturing of white space created by her use of blank space, stanza breaks, and caesuras, which invites meditation. If your language is a dialect of shards, if your history was invented by rupture, then you might have to master the discipline of rupture itself as a grammar to take a measure of what was lost. It is a long, patient work of assemblage, memory by memory, which the poet cultivates from fruits and seeds in search of her garden city and lost beloveds. That search echoes hauntingly in the last line of the poem in which the poet asks, “where have they gone?” 

Let us consider one last poem “Pomegranate”:  

As in the two previous poems of Elhillo, the poetic gaze centers aunts, daughters, and sisters, which is significant. The history and literature of postcolonial dislocation, a mosaic of texts across homelands and diasporas, was for the longest time the story of heroic men who were traumatized by the hand of colonial brutes. Case in point, the postcolonial genius of Achebe, Soyinka, Walcott, Braithwaite, our great fathers who have been cited ad infinitum. Elhillo challenges this single story and the erasure it encapsulates. Working in the lineage of Maaza Mengiste,  Leila Aboulela, Marwa Helal, Warsan Shire, Ladan Osman, among others, what Elhillo does is not so much that she chronicles and reinvents this lost archive of daughters, so much as that she lifts a curtain and allows us listen in on the multivocal hum of these women and girls’ sacred togetherness; these women and girls who in relation to one another and among one another—the audience they most treasure anyway—have never been voiceless. It was the world’s listening that was askew. In so doing, she conjures a lyrical scripture of ordinary lives elegized, elevated and made sacred by a transmogrifying specificity—so that rather than women who exist in the mute periphery of postcolonial literature as written by men, we enter a lyric configuration that centers the complex inner life of specific women and are thus offered a fuller and richer narrative world.  

What is a daughter? The poet seems to ask in this poem. She pursues her answers through the morphology and ecological history of a fruit. A fruit is a gift of nature tenderly and jealously nurtured, the poem seems to say, but this nurture is ultimately for consumption. A fruit does not, cannot, eat itself. Someone else, something else, must do the devouring. A fruit derives its life and integrity from its intactness and purity. Here, we reach the limit of the ecological signification and Elhillo’s masterful and unflinching interrogation of it, so she might reject its implications with her power of subjectivity. The next line cleaves in half as it marks that rejection: “& it is wasted on me?” The question mark that delineates the border of that statement functions almost like a sickle with which the poet cuts deep into the stem of a tap-rooted tree of an asphyxiating sociological practice and inheritance. We read the question mark not just as signaling a question and an interruption in the middle of a poetic line, but also as signaling a break in tradition, a questioning of long-held assumptions and cultural landmarks. 

As in the other poems considered earlier in this essay, the ecological significations in this poem perform two functions simultaneously. The fruits metaphorize the suffocating information passed down to the poet by the society as encrypted in her name—a command to be pure, intact, unbroken for a man; however, as the poem continues the fruits also encode her rebellion, her brilliance, and her aliveness. This is her break from tradition:  

The “I” that begins the first stanza is symbolic as it is the negation of the imposed objectification, the condition predestined for the “fruit” of the first stanza by those who gave her name. Yet, the persona is on her own search for agency and self-definition, and the search is itself a category of liberation. She searches for what was buried and forgotten (the deeper and alternative meaning of her name, her agency, her sisters’). She searches for what was discarded “without ceremony” like fallen seeds, which recalls the “seeds spit out of car windows” from “Pomegranate with Partial Nude,” which in turn recalls the pang of eviction and dispersion from a native paradise. The “buried” in this poem achingly signifies erasure and disappearance.  

But as the poem climaxes, we observe the fall of seeds is merely a prelude to resurrection. In the last stanza, we are encouraged to read the word “wonder” as the door to that resurrection. The poet writes “I have to wonder” and as she does, this sensory archival work further transforms her as she transforms the story that was allotted to her: “I wonder about the trees.” The “wonder” in this poem serves as an aesthetic and political antidote to burial. We read “trees” as standing in for an ecosystem denoting fullness of life and possibility, her “garden city.” “Wonder” then functions as a sentient shovel which digs and excavates the fossilized soil of history. It exhumes, uncovers, and reclaims. It brings closed and discarded things out into the open for reconsideration. The catalogue of fruits “guavas, blood orange, pomegranate” is resonant and returns us poignantly to where we began this essay: a paradise, albeit a dismantled one. But the poet is in the act of reconstruction, as she is naming the fruits of her reclaimed paradise and in so doing, perhaps she is also renaming herself. These reclaimed fruits are neither pure nor intact and need not be. They have been slit and splayed open; they have been ruptured but their rupture signals the beginning of a metamorphic cycle. This rupture, like a door, allows the fruits to reveal their sturdy and startling interiority, their aliveness beyond the surface-level purity and ripeness. The poet is constructing purity as a less fruitful currency than alertness, rawness, wildness, and openness in this new Eden of self.

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Works Cited  

Elhillo, Safia. “first adornment.” The January Children. University Of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2017, p. 16. 
Elhillo, Safia. “Pomegranate.” Girls That Never Die: Poems. Penguin Random House, New York, NY, 2022, pp. 21-22. 
Elhillo, Safia. “Pomegranate with Partial Nude.” Girls That Never Die: Poems. Penguin Random House, New York, NY, 2022, pp. 23-24. 
Sarr, Mohamed Mbougar. The Most Secret Memory of Men. Other Press, New York, 2023. 

Read more in this issue: Interview | Poems | Writing Prompt

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By Meta DuEwa Jones, PhD

Letter #1: An Introduction^[i]

Dear _______________
In this space, in this time, I am a writer, a researcher, a scholar engaged in black study, guiding us through Erica Hunt’s poetics and prose.

Let’s journey together, on this word-train: “Where I am the Sunday / company / glad to be a passenger.”^[ii]

A life-long journaler, Erica Hunt’s practice spans more than a half-century.^[iii] A graduate of San Francisco State University and Bennington College, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts, Hunt’s creative endeavors include poetry, essays, editing, inter-artistic collaboration, and literary and cultural theory. Her renovative poetics evinces radical practices in Black avant-garde traditions.^[iv] Hunt has worked as a philanthropic foundation leader, a community activist, a juror for literary prizes, and a thought leader.

Across the country, she has been awarded distinguished fellowships from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Djerassi Foundation, among others; and she has taught at several universities, including Duke, Wesleyan, Temple, and Brown. Hunt has nourished, and been nurtured by, a range of intellectuals, creatives, and activists engaged in literary and cultural organizations, feminist art communities, and writing institutes such as the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, Cave Canem, and the Kelly Writer’s House at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a consistent collaborator with Black visual artists such as Allison Saar, creative intellectuals such as Saidiya Hartman, fellow poetic innovators such as Harryette Mullen, and composers and performers such as JJJJJerome Ellis.

Hunthas authored seven books: Local History, Arcade, Piece Logic, Time Slips Right Before Your Eyes, A Day and Its Approximates, Veronica: A Suite in X Parts, and Jump the Clock.^[v] A wide range of contemporary journals, prestigious literary magazines and anthologies have also featured her work, including: BOMB, Boundary 2, FENCE, Hambone, The Los Angeles Review of Books; In the American Tree, Gathering Ground, and Seeding the Future.

Through dissonant sounds, arch allusions, and deliberate use of silence, Hunt’s poetry strategically tightropes “the verge of legibility.”^[vi]  Her “oppositional writing” practice incorporates “unrecognizable speech” patterns to counter discursive domination through mainstream literary cultures co-optation of insurgent aesthetics.^[vii] This aesthetics of dissidence advances disparate forms of “black avant gardism”^[viii] and continues the innovative liberatory praxis of many writers of the Black Arts Movement. With poet Dawn Lundy Martin, Hunt’s visionary assemblage in Letters to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing, buttressed the visibility and indelible impact of female and genderqueer artists. She platforms artists “committed to a radical practice of literary work, necessary alchemists in the word.”^[ix] Likewise, she works to “set boundaries anew” by “estranging familiar forms” like the “letter and diary.”^[x]

Let’s reset the boundaries for critical essays on Erica Hunt.^[xi]

To assay her treasure in word-wealth, I think with, and write in, the letter mode. I follow an African American literary and cultural tradition of letter-writing.^[xii] This epistolary form reflects creative style as intellectual practice. My formal cue comes from Hunt’s career; her prose poetic epistles transform the relationship between intimacy, erudition, and the public sphere.

Yours, truly in public,
—M.

* * *

Postcard #1: An Invitation
Dear Public One:

I write to you, by the blacklight of poet June Jordan: these
letters are things that I do in the dark—and the dawn—
reaching for you.^[xiii] In some form, these letters are love
poems—but not in a sentimental mood.^[xiv] My invitation: Do
your thing, or ya thang! I’d love to read from you once
you’ve read Lauren K. Alleyne’s interview and Hunt’s work:^[xv]
How do you engage Hunt’s (epistolary) practice?  What do
you encounter in your own letter-writing journey?       

                                                                                 Reaching
                                                                                 for you,    

                                                                                 —M.

* * *

Letter #2 Against Flatness: An Encounter

Dear E:
It’s been decades since I first encountered your work. I met your writing-mind—and you—the poet-philosopher in-the-flesh at nearly the same time.

From a region in my place memory, I still see the table-top lectern where you placed the cream and carmine jacket for your newest book (at the time): Arcade.^[xvi] You were the “Black woman at the podium . . .” bringing “a treasury of rhetorical wealth;” rewriting “ a radically different text for female empowerment.^[xvii]” Once upon a time, the slanted podium you spoke from lived as a tree. Oak? Mahogany? I can’t see the grain, but I remember the wood, stained. I remember grasping the thick sides of the slick square before introducing you for a campus reading.

Arcade’s jacket design featured your name, and your collaborator, the sculptor and printmaker, Alison Saar’s name, too. The words:
“POEMS” and “WOODCUTS”
in bold, at the bottom, in two ecru rectangles. The rectangles’ edges were serrated. Each bolt resembled a strip of paper or unbleached linen; the beige blocks contrasted the surrounding geometric tiles.^[xviii] And I remember a pun about Alison’s artwork: weren’t the book’s pages made of cut, pulped, wood? I thought, but did not ask, this question. It seemed too clever by half. 

Now, as I type this letter in bytes, I remember my first encounter with Arcade . . . .
The touch of vellum parchment.
The thrill of cerebral play.
The feel of my index finger pressing on words from your verse, tracing Alison’s lines.
Tactile reading.
Your poem, “First Words,” curtailed behind—peeking through—Alison’s drawing. ^[xix]
Her printmaking and your wordmaking process, together, “fighting flatness.” ^[xx] 
Breaking and bending and baring and blurring boundaries, below . . . 

See how Alison carves a thick curtain, encircled by color and light? See the curved figure, in full fetal position?

I see a world; I see a womb; I see a red moon.

See how the dark lines of your poem hover between translucence and opacity?

“We have this in common: art and life, children, daughters named Maddy,”^[xxi] you and Alison wrote. Your collaboration renovates the visual-verbal architecture of Black maternal aesthetics.^[xxii]

I read a few words from your “First Words;” you reference:
what’s under stones or understates
the tension of what’s concealed
and what’s shown.

Your riff on “words that return in the face / the face of the familiar” and your penchant for parataxis repeats phrases presenting a surface feel of the familiar. Your deft syntactical shifts from noun and verb catch my eye and ear.

You shadow box with syntax.

“The past tense of read is read,” you wrote.^[xxiii] I read Arcade, presently, and what hovers in my ear-mind? Your assertion in the essay “Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde”:
“The world is in the text and the text is in the world.”^[xxiv]

I echo your chiasmus with my own:
The womb is in the text and the text is in the womb.

The carved lines of Alison’s woodcuts create a harbor, a word-womb in wine red, eggshell, and burnt umber. Tricolor enchantment.

Arcade transforms apperceptive possibility. I call this a form of black alchemy.^[xxv]

P.S. Do you see what I see?
—M.

* * *

Letter #2B Introduced: Another Story

Dear E:
You said “[s]tories . . . are repeated to someone who wasn’t involved, to get your side of the story told.” ^[xxvi] Well, this story involves you. My side of this story “tells and forgets.”^[xxvii]

Not one, but two of my professors introduced me to you during my first year in graduate school. ^[xxviii]

‘Introduced’ is not quite the right verb.

In “Personal” you wrote: “grammar—a cause.”^[xxix] Your continual creative parsing of grammar prods more precision.^[xxx] “Tailored,” a denominal verb, better suits the occasion that shaped our first encounter. Two university garments, teaching and mentoring, shaped my enduring engagement with your work.

I don’t remember which came first: reading your widely influential essay, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” in a grad theory seminar, or, being invited to introduce you at a reading. Memory’s mechanics fray the seams; the time slips.

You ask, “[h]ow does she keep the stories apart, from falling into one another?” ^[xxxi]

I do remember exiting through the side doors of Margaret Jacks Hall, then walking straight across the Quad to the beige and red-tiled building (ironically) called Green Library on Stanford’s campus. I researched the history of Kelsey Street Press, the feminist, experimental-arts press that published Arcade. I scoured the stacks to locate, and read—any, and—everything I could find written by and about you. I scanned the grayish blur on the microfilm—or was it microfiche?— machine so I could access an archived news-page from an early book review from the Village Voice Literary Supplement.

The reviewer began their engaged encounter with Local History by asking: 
“What might draw a reader into an author’s first book?”

The question, was, of course, rhetorical. The answer was:
“Hunt’s opening line was enough to do the trick:
‘I was thinking that if the ceiling were mirrored we would have to watch what we say
about how we feel.’
Local History holds enough cleverly built dislocations to catch . . . readers
unaware and force them to go back over that sentence to see if it meant to say
what it said.”^[xxxii] (13, VLS).

The epistolary, like a book review, is a form of encounter. When the epistle, to use an old-fashioned, clerical term, is enclosed in—or as—an essay, a poem, or a book—as many of your letters have been—the dialogic encounter between writer-and-reader is drawn out across time. The possibility for direct response is deflected into other modes like reviews.

The reviewer’s question emphasizes authorial time, the order of your story. Your first book.

My questions follow a sequence, too: Do you read reviews of your work? Do you ever shift the terms of the encounter by writing a letter to your reviewer?

Until I can read your side of the story, 
—M.

* * *

Letter #4: Marking Time: Between Enclosure and Boundlessness

Dear E:
When you said, “every statement of poetics bears the mark of its time,”^[xxxiii] you included your own. Likewise, when you wrote “every artistic practice is imprinted with its particular tensions of audience, time, and place,” you wrote in a public space.^[xxxiv] 

Place: a Boston Review forum. Time: Spring, 2015. Audience: “known and unknown readers”^[xxxv]

The attention to “race” and “the poetic avant-garde” are the forum’s foci.^[xxxvi] But the stylistic innovations of your work—aesthetic strategies that include “fragmented voice, disjunctive logic, and paratactic lines”—are not bound by race, language-centered writing or time.

From Local History (1994) to Jump the Clock (2020), your poetic method addresses the reader—and (fictional) recipients—through the forms of enclosure^[xxxvii]the epistolary provides. Letters to the Future includes both visual art created in-and-as a letter form, as well as written letters by you and others, from conceptual artist Adrian Piper’s 2013 “Imagine” postcard, to your correspondence with playwright Adrienne Kennedy. I marveled at how you and Dawn choreographed a call and response to cohere each artist’s unique aesthetic expressivity. Your editorial and epistolary practices engage Black aesthetic practices, plural. ^[xxxviii]  E., the friend~ship you and D. share operates as a verb: it breathes air into the sails of Letters; it buoys all 453 pages; it anchors the book’s radical artistic journey.

You said your poetry is “a rehearsal space.” The Black feminist sense of Caribbean rehearsal is evident in your staging of the epistolary as a site for expressive experimentalism. ^[xxxix] Letters is replete with multiple prologues, forewords, introductions, afterwords and closing words. Within these curtailed forms, you create a sense of aesthetic boundlessness.

But (say) what about “the mark of its time”?

Letters to the Future took protracted time, labor, and yes, love. The need for relation and connection was great, and grave. You observed “the time of this collection, 2015-2017, was marked by an inflection in the world’s deteriorating economic and political relations.”^[xl]  You invested three years to curate and cohere creative community. Letters anticipated the particular tensions of Pandemic Time, it Jump[ed] the Clock. You struck that clock at the janus hour when you reflected that 2020 “will be marked as a portal or an abyss or both.”^[xli]

P.S. What made you shift from an anticipatory temporal mode in Letters to the Future to a “poetics of the present” in Jump the Clock?”^[xlii]

                  marking time until your future reply,  
—M.

* * *

Letter #5: Notes on Notes: The Temporal, The Oppositional & The Ordinary

Dear E:
Did you receive my letter last month? A few weeks ago, I watched the livestream of your conversation with Saidiya Hartman and JJJJJerome Ellis.^[xliii] For some time now, I’ve been mulling over your talk, “Language in the Ruins,” and your rehearsal of temporality as a poetic, political and philosophical practice. You commended Saidiya’s “way of reading the past” as a survival practice, a strategic “present tool.”

It was poetic heaven, or at the very least, a haven, to hear you delineate Gwendolyn Brooks’ sonnet, “my dreams, my works must wait till after hell.” (Forgive the sentimentalism of my pun). Your renovative attention to Brooks’ gendered poetics of time in off-rhyme pairs such as “incomplete” and “wait” was spot-on. Your reading of lines like “I am very hungry. I am incomplete” and “No man can give me any word but Wait.” brought Brooks’ lyric to bear on our contemporary moment. ^[xliv]  

“We wait, we wait, are told wait,” you lamented.

“We hold our breaths. I can’t breathe,” you added to this refrain. “How can we wait?”

You work through the wound of “waiting;” you turn the key on “its temporal lock.”^[xlv]
Thank you for opening the door to “hope” despite justice delayed, justice denied.
Your critique of the politics of “patience” tends towards what the scholar Julius Fleming coined as Afro-presentism.

Your focus on the political function of parts of speech in Brooks reflects your investment in examining “the politics of poetic form”^[xlvi] in your widely influential essay, “Notes for Oppositional Poetics.” “Notes” elucidates the strategies for “oppositional writing” in two novels: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi.^[xlvii] E, at first, I wondered why your excellent explication of novels was published in a collection theorizing poetics. But your essay indicates that distinct conceptions of genres, like grammar, are politically and discursively constructed. I first learned from your “Notes” to think critically about the atemporal structure of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.  You indexed the “extremely violent conditions” that Black mothers endured within “slave society” as marked by Sethe’s disavowal of “official historical time. ”^[xlviii]  And violence, specifically the “submerged, disconnected and violent character of contemporary life,” compelled you to change your essay’s original title.^[xlix] You replaced “Possibility” with “Notes.” 

Possibility connotes promise; Notes suggests preservation.

Possibility points to the future; Notes records, and becomes a record of, the past.

I think, here and now, of Cristina Sharpe’s newest book, Ordinary Notes.^[l]  Cristina’s distilled, condensed writing on quotidian encounters with antiblack violence and misogynoir indict and unsettle. Have you read it, yet E? What do you think of it, how may you think with it?

In possibility,
—M.

* * *

Letter #8 Touching: On Legibility

Dear E:
Even if “Correspondence Theory” didn’t hint, I would still feel called to respond; desire to engage your theory and practice; your avant-garde practice as theory.

Not too much time, say, around A Day And Its Approximates^[li] after reading your poem, “Reader we were meant to meet,” I caught a snag in the net of your writing-mind. 

You have often invoked the strategic power of illegibility in formal innovation, especially for oppressed communities. Imagine my surprise when I arrived at these lines: “Reader, you were meant to be legible / even in the failure to communicate.” ^[lii]  The slippage—between the intention, or the capacity, to be clearly understood, and the inevitable disconnect—piques. The (un)decipherable code beckons and vexes.

I am touched by the tactile in your poem~theory, too. You declared:
Touch, reader, we were meant to touch
to exchange definitions and feed the pulse of
language. I promise if you step in [ . . . ]^[liii]
I step outside of the poem to step into the poem’s promise: the subjunctive “if.” “Were meant to” can also mean “but have not yet;” it can also mean “we might not.”

Does this yearning to connect, this reaching towards the reader, animate your letters?  
Does the proximal play with proximity, and distance, in your letters delight or rattle?
Does the epistolary make a promise it (knows it) can’t keep? 

feeling the pulse of (your) language,
                                             —M. 

* * *

Letter #13: How We Get Free: Don’t Skip. Jump! Fly!

Dear E.
You titled your new and selected poems, Jump The Clock. “Jump” is an imperative; “clock” serves as a noun.  Let’s make a jump cut, a chiasmic shift.

Let’s clock the jump.

A recent review suggests your phrase could signify “jumping out of clock-time altogether—out of mechanized, monetized time. . . ”^[liv]

• Does your call to “jump” urge readers to quickly move beyond time’s frame or time frames?
• Does your “jump” diddle with the line from the nursery rhyme: “the cow jumps over the moon”?
• Does your pun on the cliché “time flies” seek freedom through propulsive flight?

I realize the answer could be “yes” to one, all, or none of these questions.

We connect, and disconnect, across temporal movements and their measurements. Your work indexes the (im)possibility of accurately taking time’s true temperature—even as the impulse to measure, to mark, time’s passage endures. Time blindsides sight. The day shifts from slip to jump. Your poem, “Octavio Paz’ Calendar,” where the phrase, “to jump the clock” appears, underscores this.  Your reference to the celestial world, the world of “the sun,” slips into a mathematical one, a world of (dual) calculation. You wrote:
the sun pours into pools of heat
the same sun you round up to 584 days
I tab at 365 and change not keeping score.^[lv]

We correspond on differential planes and zones of time.
Jumping involves kinetic movement; to jump the clock is to seek flight.

Let’s make
a jump cut.

* * *

E., have you read Toni Cade Bambara’s short story, the Education of a Storyteller?
Jump the Clock provides a theory of time, space, and flight. So, too, does “Education.”

To make a short story shorter, Bambara begins with a black girlchild, Peaches, in conversation with her Grandma Dorothy. She learns how our African ancestors did the thing that needed to be done. How rest was won. Not despite, but to spite the arresting chain-hold by those European (sea) captains of captivity during that murderous Middle Passage.

Some of us did not die, June Jordan reminds us.^[lvi] None of us willingly chose to take the “voyage through death / to life upon these shores” that Robert Hayden chronicled.^[lvii]

Some of us skipped the shore. Nah, we didn’t skip. This weren’t no skippity-zippity, “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” Song of the South, Disney-movie version; romancing slavery; serving our subjugation on a prettified plantation platter.

Bambara’s narrator tells of “that terrible time when we were kidnapped, herded in ships, and brought here in chains as enslaved labor [ . . . .] when the boat brought the Africans from the big ships to the shore . . .”^[lviii]

Some of us walked.

The order of the story goes:
“[T]hose Africans stepped out onto the land, took a look around, and with deep-sight vison saw what the European further had in store for them, whereupon they turned right around and walked all the way home, all the way home to the motherland.”^[lix]

Some of us flew.

Another side of the story goes:
“And there on the deck, we looked to shore, and saw what was further in store and we flew away to Guinea.”^[lx]

Some of us jumped!
out of the boat                         into the plane of wet              across the plane of air

Later, we learned to tell these storied lessons in liberation.
“Of course we know how to walk on the water, of course we know how to fly,” Grandma Dorothy tells Peaches. ^[lxi]

Your storied lesson on liberation appears in the Author’s Note in Jump the Clock. You said your poems “were and are a rehearsal space for emancipated knowing, thinking and feeling; the open space of hope. . .”^[lxii]

I, your reader, respond here—rehearse in the open space beside you:
jumping through the open       surrendering to the air             not succumbing to the sea
your emancipated knowing:   how we get free

    taking flight

—M.

* * *

---

^[i] I dedicate this epistolary essay, in memoriam, to Althea Tait, an influential writer, professor and scholar of Black feminist literature, children’s literature and poetry and poetics. Althea: “pink-think” theorist of Magenta! Althea, come from spirit-strong faith, family and friendship. Althea, who made writer family breaking bread with we Wintergreen Women Writers Collective. Althea’s sudden passing changed the arc of these letters towards time-slippage.

^[ii] Erica Hunt and Alison Saar. “First Words,” Arcade, (Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press, 1996.) p. 9.

^[iii] Hunt frames her introduction into poetic practice through journaling, “for more than 52 years . . . since I was a girl. . . and writing poems much of the time.” (Hunt 00:12:15-12:38). Hunt, Erica. Furious Flower Facebook Live Reading Series Presents Erica Hunt, YouTube, uploaded by Furious Flower Poetry Center, 4 Oct. 2021, https://youtu.be/mG7w1lRcUtQ?si=EJyeZGKaT-VGpOWH&t=730.

^[iv] I see Hunt working within a Black avant-garde tradition whose formal innovation includes an investment in historical forebears, identified as “contemporary renovative poetics.” Jones, Meta DuEwa, “The String of Grace: Renovating New Rhythms in the Present-Future of Black Poetry and Music,” Furious Flower: Seeding The Future of African American Poetry, Edited by Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2020, pp. 213-230.

^[v] Hunt, Erica. Local History, New York: Roof Books, 1994; Arcade, with Alison Saar, Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press, 1996, Piece Logic, Durham: Carolina Wren Press, 2002; Time Slips Right Before Your Eyes, New York: Belladona Press, 2006 (Reissue 2015);  A Day and Its Approximates, Tucson: Chax Press, 2013; Veronica: A Suite in X Parts, Chicago: Selva Oscura Press, 2019; and Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems, New York: Nightboat Books, 2020.

^[vi] “Erica Hunt,” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/erica-hunt.

^[vii] “Erica Hunt,” “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, Edited by Charles Bernstein, New York: Roof Books, 1990, 197, p. 203-204.

^[viii]“Black avant-gardism” is a theoretical concept coined by the scholar Keith Leonard. Unpublished manuscript, See synopsis of this project. “Abstract,” ACLS Fellow Grantees;

^[ix]Hunt, “Introduction: Angle, Defy Gravity, Land Unpredictably,” Letters to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing, Edited by Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin, Tucson: Kore Press, 2018. p. 15.

^[x] “Erica Hunt,” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/erica-hunt; Harryette Mullen, “Description,” Blurb, Local History, https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/0937804533/Local-History.aspx

^[xi] For excellent scholarship on Erica Hunt, see: Kinnahan, Linda, “Bodies written off”: Economies of Race and Gender in the Visual/Verbal Collaborative Clash of Erica Hunt’s and Alison Saar’s Arcade,” We Who Love To Be Astonished : Experimental Women’s Writing And Performance Poetics, Edited by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002; Cummings, Allison, “Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. 26a; 3-36; Schultz, Kathy Lou. “Rock and a Hard Place: Erica Hunt and the Poetics of African-American Post-modernity.” How2 1.5 (2001): n. page. Web 21 Sept. 2015. Book-length treatments have trended in the direction of emphasizing the connections between Hunt’s challenges to standardized language practices and conceptualization of political functions of grammatical orders in relationship to Black Arts / Black Aesthetics movement(s) and their relationship to experiments and innovation in (oft unacknowledged) parallels and tributaries with other avant-garde practices. See, Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2011, pp. 9-12, 14 and 85; Anthony Reed, Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2016, pp. 1-2, 100, 106.

^[xii] Examples of black epistolary practice in poetry, fiction and non-fiction, and scholarship abound. Some of the most well-known literary letters include: James Baldwin,  Letter to My Nephew, The Progressive,  1 Dec, 1962, Alice Walker, The Color Purple, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015;  Letters by Hunt’s contemporaries in formally innovative, renovative poetics include Nathaniel Mackey, Volume #1, From A Broken Bottle, Traces of Perfume Still Emanate: Bedouin Hornbook; Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 1987; Barbara Henning, Looking Up Harryette Mullen: Interviews on Sleeping with the Dictionary and Other Works, New York: Belladonna, 2011, Evie Shockley, The New Black, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2012. Recent theological scholarship in black study, and blackqueer studies, comprised in serial letters scholarship see Ashon Crawley, The Lonely Letters, Duke University Press, 2020.

^[xiii] Jordan, June “These Poems,” Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, Foreword by Adrienne Rich, Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2007. p. 3.

^[xiv] I’m inspired by Damaris B. Hill’s address, where she writes “the legacy of these women’s lives chase me like a strong wind. This book is a love letter to women. . .” “Preface,” A Bound Woman Is A Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019, xviii.

^[xv] I’m serious about this letter-play. Email a response letter to: metadj@email.unc.edu. Please put the name Erica Hunt in the subject header of your email.

^[xvi] Hunt and Saar, Arcade, Berkeley, Kelsey Street Press, 1996.

^[xvii] Hortense Spillers, “Mamas’ Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Black, White and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 203, 229. I was introduced to Spillers’ thinking, and her in person, by Professor Sharon Holland during that same semester. Spillers was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

^[xviii] The book was designed by Poulson/Gluck.

^[xix] Hunt and Saar, “First Words,” Arcade, p. 3.

^[xx] Saar states she’s “always been interested in pushing those boundaries to combat the medium’s [printmaking’s] inherent flatness.” p. 95.  Saar, Alison. “Fighting Flatness,” Mirror, Mirror: The Prints of Alison Saar: From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, New York, Printed in Italy, Distributed by D.A.P. See for an excellent review of Saar’s aesthetic practice, see Cristina Sharpe, “Alison Saar, the Alchemist” Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe, Pomona, Benton Museum of Art, 2021.

^[xxi] Hunt and Saar, “Collaborative Statement,” Arcade, p. 53.

^[xxii] Jennifer Nash’s Birthing Black Mothers, Durham, Duke University Press, pp. 103-31.

^[xxiii] Hunt, “City,” Jump the Clock, p. 20.

^[xxiv] Hunt, “Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde,” 10 Mar., 2015, Boston Review, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/erica-hunt-forum-response-race-avant-garde/

^[xxv] These letters are excerpted from a chapter from my current unpublished book manuscript, “Black Alchemy.”

^[xxvi] Hunt, “Chapter 5: Going Home,” The Time Slips Right Before the Eyes, New York: Belladonna, 2006, p. 17.

^[xxvii] Hunt, “The Time Slips Before Right Before Your Eyes,” The Time Slips, p.12.

^[xxviii] Gratitude to Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University, and, in memoriam, the late Professor Diane Wood Middlebrook, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University.

^[xxix] Hunt, “Personal,” Arcade, p. 35.

^[xxx] Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” pp. 197-212.

^[xxxi] Hunt, “Chapter 2: Back-Home,” The Time Slips, p. 14.

^[xxxii] Review of Erica Hunt, Local History, Voice Literary Supplement, Village Voice, Apr. 1994. p. 13. 

^[xxxiii] Hunt, “Statement of Poetics,” Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, Edited by Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020, pp. 337-38.

^[xxxiv] Hunt, “Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde,” n.p.

^[xxxv] Harryette Mullen, “Imagining the Unimagined Reader: Writing to the Unborn and Including the Excluded,” The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. P. 3. Mullen and Hunt share what poet and critic Julian Sphar observes is an “attention to reading . . . rooted in the intersection between language writing’s pursuit of wild reading and autonomy—and identity-centered poetries’ concerns with community building and alliance.” Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001, p. 115.

^[xxxvi] Hunt, “Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde,” n.p.

^[xxxvii] Meta DuEwa, Jones, “Reframing Exposure: Natasha Trethewey’s Forms Of Enclosure,” ELH: English Literary History, Vol. 82, No. 2, Summer 2015, p. 411.

^[xxxviii] Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2011, p. 9.

^[xxxix] Hunt, “Author’s Note & Acknowledgements,” Jump the Clock, p. 194.; Tanya Shields, Bodies and Bones: Feminist Rehearsals and Imagining Caribbean Belonging, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014.

^[xl] Hunt, “Introduction: Angle, Defy Gravity, Land Unpredictably,” p. 15.

^[xli] Hunt, “Author’s Note,” p. 193.

^[xlii] Hunt, Author’s Note,” p. 193.

^[xliii] “JJJJJerome Ellis, Saidiya Hartman, and Erica Hunt, CAAPP, Streamed live on Sep 29, 2020. YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/live/2bSu_ysGzVQ?si=qUti2tBbUnLf32I0

^[xliv] Gwendolyn Brooks, “Gay Chaps at the Bar: ‘my dreams, my works must wait till after hell’”, Selected Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks, New York: Harper Perennial, 2006, p. 23; Hunt, “Language in the Ruins: (Hunt: 00:53:53:-53:47) https://www.youtube.com/live/2bSu_ysGzVQ?si=qUti2tBbUnLf32I0

^[xlv] Hunt, “Looking for Language in the Ruins,” (Hunt: 00:53:53:-53:47) https://www.youtube.com/live/2bSu_ysGzVQ?si=qUti2tBbUnLf32I0

^[xlvi] Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” pp. 197-212.

^[xlvii] Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics” pp. 197, 208-12.

^[xlviii] Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics” pp. 197-204.

^[xlix] Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” pp. 197-200.

^[l] Cristina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes, New York: FSG, 2023.

^[li] Hunt, A Day And It’s Approximates, CHAX Press, 2013; Jump The Clock, 109.

^[lii] Hunt, “Reader we were meant to meet,” Jump The Clock, 109.

^[liii] Hunt, “Reader” 109.

^[liv] Ben Lerner, Review. Jump The Clock. 25 Feb.  2021. The New York Review of Books. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/02/25/erica-hunt-past-imperfect/

^[lv] Hunt, “Octavio Paz’ Calendar, Jump The Clock, p. 117.

^[lvi] Jordan, June, Some Of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays, New York: Civitas Books, 2003.

^[lvii] Hayden, Robert, “Middle Passage,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43076/middle-passage

^[lviii] Toni Cade Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays and Conversations, Edited by Toni Morrison, New York: Pantheon, 1996, p. 253.

^[lix] Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” p. 253.

^[lix] Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” p. 254.

^[lx] Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” pp. 253-254.

^[lxi] Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” pp. 255.

^[lxii] Hunt, “Author’s Note & Acknowledgements,” Jump the Clock, p. 194.

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Read more in this issue: Interview | Poems | Writing Prompt

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Meta DuEwa Jones is a creative scholar, and Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She authored The Muse Is Music (Illinois, 2011), which was awarded honorable mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize. Jones’s current monograph in progress, “Black Alchemy,” is a hybrid genre work of poetry, theory, and memoir that both explores–and participates in–collaborations between poets, writers of autobiography/memoir, and visual artists.  How do Black Diasporic creatives attend to the legacy of slavery and global migration and its impact on notions of community, kinship and freedom? “Black Alchemy” seeks to answer that question through research, autobiographical vignettes and close-analysis that considers the points of origin and affiliation of diverse contemporary artists who travel along waterways and byways, trains and trails in sites such as Eritrea, Ghana, Jamaica, South Africa and the United States.  Jones’s creative scholarship, focused on African-American poetry and inter-arts, has been published in diverse venues. Jones’s research and writing has been supported by fellowships from the National Humanities Center; the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University; the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University; the Rockefeller, Woodrow Wilson, and Mellon Foundations; the Stanford Humanities Center; and the Carter G. Woodson Institute.

 

By Ronald Cummings, PhD

I brought you to see where we   
started from, the undeniable beauty,   
the eyes that still smile and remind you   
this is who they were.   

-Mervyn Taylor, “The Years” 

The lines above appear in the final stanza of Mervyn Taylor’s poem “The Years.” We might read them as a statement of poetic purpose, a reflection on the possibility of poems to take us on journeys. Taylor’s phrase “where we / started from” is notably about the dynamics of time and place and both of these inform his poetic mappings as journeys (8). Taylor has also talked about his poems as shaped by a sense of “rediscovery.”¹ Here the notion of “rediscovery” runs counter to that infamous tale of colonial “discovery” or what the writer and philosopher Sylvia Wynter in her essay “1492: A New World View” has called the “first poetics of the Propter Nos” of 1492 that sought to define the Caribbean, to parcel territories and borders, and to govern the ways in which the region and its peoples might be named and known (20). According to Wynter, “that world-fateful day in October 1492” inaugurated “representation systems and categorical models” (49, 41) that have continued to structure terms of imagining and narration. In the poem “The Mountains Warned Us of Your Coming,” Taylor invokes “the rumbling, the new ships heard” as another way of referencing that violence of colonial military encounter (9). By contrast, Taylor’s “rediscovery” articulates the Caribbean in terms of multiplicity and an unfolding sense of astonishment and unknowing. He remains attuned to the surprise of the Caribbean as it might be revealed in the folds of different years² or on a corner of Pacific Avenue in Brooklyn or “in the hills above the Bay Area” (67).³ Taylor (re)articulates the Caribbean as a question. He ends the poem “The Years” with the inviting query, “Would you / like to hear all their stories?” (8).  

Taylor’s notion of “rediscovery” is both a philosophy of poetry and a rumination on the experience of reading and writing. In the blog “Mervyn Taylor: A Strong sense of home, of rediscovery,” he asserts:  

Taylor’s poems then might be read in invitational terms and also as epistemologies of Caribbean re-encounter.⁴ Readers are asked to grapple and engage with the repeating and restructured materialities of Caribbean culture and experience as they are evidenced in the everyday. These are poems as vignettes in the long history of time. We see Taylor’s concern with time, history, and place in his titling of the sections of his most recent book The Last Train (Broadstone Books 2023). The first of the three sections of the volume, for instance, is titled “Where we began” while the last is titled “What became of us.” Speaking specifically about the poems that appear in this volume, Taylor has noted that: 

Rather than engaging grand narratives of history, Taylor’s sense of place and time is filtered through an attention to everyday life, its cyclical shifts and returns. It is little wonder therefore that his work attends to how Caribbean people keep time: births, deaths, market, rainfall, floods, the rise and fall of tides, changes in address, migrations, music. These all become the substance of his poems. Taylor’s poetry constructs what I read as a Caribbean collective cultural commons or what he calls in the poem “The Last Island,” “a common place” (26)—a space in which we might all rediscover and reencounter each other as well as ourselves with a view to understanding and thinking together about “where we / started from” and moving towards “a further understanding of the life we live.”  

In the discussion which follows, I reflect on Taylor’s most recent volume The Last Train as one text through which we might engage his poetic practice and think about his vision of the Caribbean. I turn to this volume because here we see a poet at the height of his creative talent reflecting on questions of life, art, mortality, and community. I also read this work in line with Myra Malkin who argues in a review of this book, which places it in the wider context of his writing, that: “The more I read him, the more I feel that his whole body of work is really … a single, richly variegated poem” (Malkin, 2023). I suggest that we might read this work in representative terms while also noting distinctions, revisions, and returns in relation to the rest of his oeuvre.⁵  

Mervyn Taylor’s The Last Train is undoubtedly a book of remembering. In keeping with his attention to time, the author offers an indexing of the meaning of the term “last” in the elegiac poem, “My Father’s Last Night” and the book’s title poem, “The Last Train.” These poems mourn the death of the father. They also situate the poet-persona in relation to family, genealogy, and legacy. In the first of these poems, death and mourning are rendered in private terms through the powerful image of the presence of the “women, / my mother among them, [who] stood round, / stirring the night air, while his hands / on the bedspread waited to be still” (Taylor 6). In “The Last Train,” this death is traced in a more public sense through the referencing of the father’s work on the railway. Here the body of the departed is attended to in ways that resonate with “My Father’s Last Night,” but which also extend that portrait. While the father’s hands are a point of focus for the observer in “My Father’s Last Night” in “The Last Train,” it is the uniform of the father, “the blue of his jacket,” his “bright brass” uniform pin and his “cap still dark” that are meant to hold the reader’s attention (25). They become quotidian items weighted with a life’s significance.  

We should not read this solely in terms of finality. Rather, in keeping with Taylor’s concern with cycles and Caribbean vernacular measures of time and movement, the title’s (the book and the poem’s) use of the term “last” comes to signal a previously departed train and or to refer to a prior journey. It becomes a marker of that which precedes the present. In this way, the phrase creates its own simultaneous sense of temporal order and opening. It invites us as readers to think about a before and after. We are left to contend with what it means for us to live in the wake of departed loved ones. 

The poet meaningfully situates himself in the father’s legacy in “The Poem as Train.” That this poem, with its attention to questions of inheritance and succession, appears immediately before “The Last Train” unsettles a total sense of the finality of the departure, (though not the intensity of feeling) that is depicted. Taylor crafts a sense of tradition that resonates, for instance, with Robert Hayden’s well-known poem “Those Winter Sundays” in which the reader is ultimately left thinking about heritage, duty, and succession. In Taylor’s verse, the train as symbol, with its architecture of interlinked carriages, not only connects Taylor to his father, but also comes to hold a larger intergenerational history of labor, migration, movement, death, heritage, and inheritance.⁶ 

While a number of the poems in this volume reflect on death and on the father, the book notably begins with birth and with the figure of the mother. Taylor’s choreography of temporality is complexly balanced from the very beginning. In the opening poem, “Arjun’s Prediction,” the poet is prefigured as prophecy. And is also, at once, a figure out of time. The opening stanza muses on the idea “[t]hat a boy like you would be / born to a woman thinking / herself beyond conceiving” (3). The prophecy of the poet’s coming is presented at once as special and mundane within the flows of local community life. After the mother allows Arjun, the bearer of the prophecy, to “live / under our house for the rest // of his life,” they are left to wonder, “what else he would be right / about; // some revelation to be made / real, however long it took” (3). The singularity of this prophetic utterance is also linked with a sense of a Messianic figuring of the child through the stories of “Miss Ina across / the ravine” and Aunt Marie who “would bring that terror dog / Nazi to stand guard” (3). These wise women, summoned by the baby’s cries, come to visit “to see what allyuh doing the child? (3). The poet figure then is from birth ushered into a community not only concerned with his well-being but who become narrative relations.  

We know that poets are well-known for conceiving their own mythologies. (We might think here of Derek Walcott’s Another Life or Kamau Brathwaite’s Sun Poem or Lorna Goodison’s I am Becoming My Mother, among others). Taylor’s poems, particularly those associated with childhood, are not simply nostalgic; they are carefully constructed temporal signposts of a journey. They conjure a considered yet intimate feeling of place and remembered lives and times. In some instances, they are historical reckonings, such as in “War Days” where childhood memories coalesce with a quotidian accounting of some the incongruities of war-time life in Trinidad.   

This poem is but one example of the historical recalling that is a feature of Taylor’s work. The poem itself becomes a form of memorialization, much like the Flanders poppy and the aunt’s song that Taylor references in the poem. In lieu of physical monuments, commemorating the “Trinidadian boys who died / in the war,” these small things, a poppy, a song, a poem, become keepsakes of memory (Taylor 5). In his own memorializing practice, Taylor remains attuned to how family stories and songs can hold histories. He also offers glimpses of how local narratives and oral tellings can potentially recuperate and remember what might be rendered quiet in national and colonial narratives.  

We can read Taylor’s The Last Train in relation to texts of poetic memoir in the Caribbean tradition such as some of those mentioned above (Walcott, Brathwaite, Goodison). However, Taylor’s practice of narrative rememory is also connected to the broader Caribbean memoir tradition. Consider how the lines above replay and recall episodes from Austin Clarke’s memoir of Barbadian childhood, Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack. In Clarke’s memoir, he writes of the impact of the second world war in Barbados: 

Sandra Pouchet-Paquet has argued in her crucial study, Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation, that Caribbean autobiographical practice offers “a linked nationalist-internationalist discourse [which] articulates specific local and global attachments” (10). Some of these attachments are inter-island interlinkings and relations as seen in the connections and echoes between Taylor’s and Clarke’s narratives of war time in Trinidad and Barbados respectively. Other attachments stretch across different diasporic and global spaces. In “War Days,” the interconnections of Empire that link the Caribbean and Britain are underlined. In the poem “The Last Island,” the geographic closeness of Trinidad and Venezuela is referenced to bear witness to how “[t]oday, a refugee / might ride that current to find // a village, and join the singing” (26).  

Elsewhere, Taylor usefully maps Caribbean connections to North American cultural, political, and artistic life and histories. “When We Were West Indian” offers brief poetic vignettes of how Caribbean culture and people have reshaped New York since the 1920s.  

The poet also locates himself in this history and geography of Caribbean New York:  

Although he remains interested in offering us the narration of a life, Taylor is not focused on giving us a singular portrait of self. Instead, throughout his work, we encounter the writer-poet always situated in relation to a complex matrix of Caribbean life that is intergenerational and integral.  

The book also records what we might understand as a community of the word. Throughout the collection, we see the poet in the company of other writers (including some mentors and friends now departed).  “I wander into your poem” is how Taylor begins “Afield (with Derek W)” (15). We might read this poem as a dialogue with Derek Walcott’s verse and as a companion piece to “The Poem as Train.”  However, if in “The Poem as Train,” the poet is represented as taking passengers on a journey, in “Afield (with Derek W),” the poet stops to “wonder how the poem can go / anywhere it wants in the world / without the poet” (15). Two poems, “Reading Outdoors” and “Reading in Bars,” might also usefully be read as companion poems. In each of these, the poet humorously reflects on the challenges of sharing one’s verse in unusual venues where disruptions and distractions abound. In “Reading in Bars,” we also see the poet in the company of Amiri Baraka, another poet he has identified as an influence:  

In the recollection of these moments, we come to understand this book as one concerned with poetry as practice, not just on the page but also shared interpersonally and communally.   

Part two of the volume remembers and recalls the late Jamaican poet Anthony McNeill to whom the book is dedicated. McNeill (1941-1996) was known for his experimental verse and was a contemporary of Mervyn Taylor’s, emerging on the Caribbean literary scene alongside other poets like Mervyn Morris, Dennis Scott, and Wayne Brown (the last two listed now deceased). In Section 2 titled, “A Bus Called Blue Danube (Jamaica Suite),” we witness the poet as travelling and writing companion with McNeill. Taylor conjures a space where Tony, the poet and the man, might be invoked and remembered again. “Bluefields” evokes “Tony’s poem / about defecating on a neighbor’s porch” (42). The poem can be read in relation to Taylor’s epistolary note, “Letter to Anthony McNeill, poet, 9/22/2016,” written on the occasion of McNeil’s birthday seven years ago, in which Taylor humorously reminiscences about McNeil’s advice on how one should deal with one’s enemies: “Shit on their porch,” you said, “as I believe you actually did one time”⁷ Taylor deliberately and disruptively refuses a past temporality, Tony’s poem, he suggests, “repeats its scatology in my ear” (42). In “Red Caps” we see Taylor writing a poem about McNeill writing a poem. The returns charted are temporal as well as spatial. The section offers what is in effect a travel itinerary with several poems named after places they travelled to together: Negril, Montego Bay, Hellshire, Linstead, Bluefields, Liguanea, Nine Miles, Goshen.  

While Taylor is best known for his writing of the cultural geographies of Trinidad and Tobago and of New York, in which Brooklyn becomes rendered as a northern Caribbean metropolis, (these locations also appear in Parts one and three of this book), his attention to Jamaica in Part two, is offered with an intimacy, fondness, and an eye for small details that makes these poems rewarding to read. Taylor assumes the position of an observer who is not a native of the island but is also at the same time not a tourist. His relation to the place, much like his relation to Tony McNeill, is resolutely fraternal. Jamaica is observed with an astute curiosity and poetic generosity. This offers moments when he is able to leverage insightful critiques. We see this, for example, in the poem “Rundown” which offers keen reflections on the intimacies and complications of Jamaican class politics.   

We also see in these poems about Jamaica, as well as elsewhere in this volume, a theory of the Caribbean as repeating islands (to borrow a term from the Cuban writer and theorist Antonio Benítez-Rojo). In some instances, this sense of repetition is prompted through the observation of spatial and geographic details. Bluefields, for instance, sparks a note of recognition. Taylor writes, it “[r]eminds me of the town I come from / in Trinidad, lanes and little houses. (42). In other instances, this sense of repetition is prompted by a realization of the cycles through which we experience Caribbean time and history and the challenge that this offers for postcolonial narratives of progress. The poem “Liguanea” ends with the line, “Ruins of plantations loom again” (34).   

The final poem of the book, “Three Chains,” is one that also invokes this sense of history. This time the repeating temporality of the islands is charted through the rise and receding of waves. The poet brings us “down to the water’s edge where/the foam retreats to become/ wave again” (89). “Three Chains” focuses on questions of property as a way of thinking about the complexities of Caribbean belonging and explores “Beachfront property” as another terrain in the long, ongoing story of Caribbean land conquest. The poet reminds us of a collective imperative and what is at stake in terms of people’s sense of place when he writes:  

That the “water’s edge” should remain the terrain of “we the people” is a matter of the flow and tides of history (89). This politic of place is what is actively being claimed through the remembrances as poems and the poems as remembrances gifted to us in this work. This is a history from below, marked by a poetics of accumulation, by ocean water sediments, and time as tide. This is how we “see where we / started from” (8). 

Notes

1. See “Mervyn Taylor: A Strong sense of home, of rediscovery” https://opalpalmeradisa.com/2021/04/09/mervyn-taylor-a-strong-sense-of-home-of-rediscovery/.
   See “Mervyn Taylor: A Strong sense of home, of rediscovery” https://opalpalmeradisa.com/2021/04/09/mervyn-taylor-a-strong-sense-of-home-of-rediscovery/. ↩︎
2. See for example Taylor’s poems “The Years”, “The Year of Hungry”, “The Year of No Carnival”, and “The Year No One Died”, which can be read as a sequence of poems in the volume The Last Trian (2023). ↩︎
3. See Taylor’s mappings of Caribbean space in North America in poems such as “Nostrand Avenue” and “Three from the Garment District” in Voices Carry (2017), the section titled “Overstayed” in The Waving Gallery (2014), and the poems “Brownstones” and “Train on a String” in Gone Away (2006). ↩︎
4. My use of the phrase “epistemologies of Caribbean re-encounter” builds on the centrality of understanding to the poetics that Taylor outlines. ↩︎
5. It is useful to note that a few poems are republished in this volume that previously appeared in Taylor’s first book An Island of His Own (1992). ↩︎
6. I am interested in the narrative return to the figure of the Black Railroad worker in the current historical moment. We might think of a number of recent Black cultural texts that have taken up the railroad as a site of Black historical formation. We might consider, for instance, the Barbadian writer Cecil Foster’s book They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada (2019), Suzette Mayr’s The Sleeping Car Porter (2022), a winner of the 2022 Giller Award, or the television series The Porter (2022). ↩︎
7. See Mervyn Taylor “Letter to Anthony McNeill, poet, 9/22/2016” https://mervyntaylorcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/mcneill.pdf ↩︎

 

Works Cited  

Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.  

Brathwaite, Kamau, Sun Poem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.  

Clarke, Austin. Growing up Stupid Under the Union Jack: A Memoir. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2005.  

Foster, Cecil. They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada. Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2019.  

Goodison, Lorna. I Am Becoming My Mother. London: New Beacon, 1986.  

Hayden, Robert. A Ballad of Remembrance. Paul Breman: London, 1962 

Malkin, Myra. “Review of The Last Train by Mervyn Taylor.” Tinderbox Poetry Journal, vol. 8, no.1, March 2023. Retrieved from https://tinderboxpoetry.com/review-of-the-last-train-by-mervyn-taylor

Mayr, Suzette. The Sleeping Car Porter. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2022.  

Pouchet-Paquet, Sandra. Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.  

Taylor, Mervyn. The Last Train. Frankfort, Kentucky: Broadstone, 2023.  

—. “Mervyn Taylor: A Strong sense of home, of rediscovery,” April 9, 2021. Retrieved from https://opalpalmeradisa.com/2021/04/09/mervyn-taylor-a-strong-sense-of-home-of-rediscovery/ 

—. Voices Carry. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2017.  

—. “Derek Walcott, Man of Faith.” Retrieved from https://mervyntaylorcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/derek-walcott.pdf 

—. “Letter to Anthony McNeill, poet, 9/22/2016.” Retrieved from https://mervyntaylorcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/mcneill.pdf 

—. The Waving Gallery. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2014.  

—. Gone Away, New York: Junction Press, 2006.  

Walcott, Another Life. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972. 

Wynter, Sylvia. “1492: A New World View”. In Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas, edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995, pp. 5–57. 

Read more in this issue: Interview | Writing Prompt | Poems

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Ronald Cummings is an associate Professor of Caribbean Literature and Black Diaspora Studies in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. His work focuses on questions of gender and sexuality and Black cultural resistance. His work has been published in various journals and he is the editor of four critical volumes including Caribbean Literatures in Transition 1970-2020, co-edited with Alison Donnell (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Harriet’s Legacies: Race, Historical memory and Futures in Canada, co-edited with Natalee Caple (McGill Queens University Press, 2022). Harriet’s Legacies was the winner of Canadian Studies Network Book Award for Best edited collection (2023). Cummings is also the editor of Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2021). He is an affiliated member of the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender, and Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg. 

By Samantha Stephens

“Consider, for a moment,           

the silence — 

this terrible white          

space;

all the things                

we never say, 

and why?” 

— Kei Miller, Things I Have Withheld  

“I feel most colored when thrown against a sharp white background.” 
— Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”  

A thin book wrapped thickly in black ink, Kei Miller’s In Nearby Bushes utilizes and subverts our expectations of color and legibility. The confrontation and experimentation with the legibility of Blackness is made overt in the cover design of his most recent collection, though it is present throughout his oeuvre. In a visual poem that opens his award-winning essay collection, Things I Have Withheld, Miller connects the abstract operations of silence and silencing with its material formations of blank, specifically “white // space” (xi). In doing so, he addresses the politics of Black legibility and physical place/lessness. Covered in columns of newspaper clippings, In Nearby Bushes subverts the sharp white background of the page, as the poet imagines and images the terrible white space of the newspaper reporting the deaths of innumerable people “in nearby bushes.” If you were to tune into the evening news in Jamaica any day of the week, you would certainly hear reports of any number of criminal activities in nearby bushes. Unsettling a trite, commonplace phrase in Jamaican popular culture, Miller’s meditation on the concept of the bush highlights the unseen, silenced, marginalized bodies located in this placeless place.

The book’s cover introduces the subversive poetics of inverted views, where each iteration of “in nearby bushes” is literally highlighted in yellow, highly contrasting the black background. Furthermore, most of the cover displays white text, causing a phenomenon known as halation—a visual fuzzing effect. This choice literally requires the eyes to open wider to absorb more light to see the text in this fashion. Defying, subverting, and resisting the optimal legibility of the traditional black text against a white background, the cover displays the inverse —transforming Zora Neale Hurston’s imagery of Black life in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” referenced in the epigraph. Miller’s engagement with Black death in Jamaica resembles the negatives in photography, a color reversal. What happens when we look through this lens? Miller offers alternative, otherwise, and imaginative ways of seeing the shape of a place by rupturing how we move through language, landscapes, people, (hi)stories and silences.

Mirroring the inverted expectations of the page on the book cover, the poetic form on the white pages within replicates the play with legibility through the typographic treatment of the newspaper entries. First captured in full, and in black ink, a February 2018 newspaper clipping report of the discovery of the “decomposed body” of a young woman “in [Hanover’s] nearby bushes” begins the “In Nearby Bushes” poetic sequence. On the four pages that follow, the report is reproduced with varied typographic presentations. The poet selects a few letters, words, and phrases from the 17-line newspaper report to present in traditional black ink and casts the rest in a light grey that almost blends into the white background of the page. These greyscale pieces gesture to the work of redaction as Miller plays with visibility and silence, creating poems out of the brief and troubled histories documented in the Jamaica Star. This move is in conversation with the concepts of Black annotation and Black redaction discussed in Christina Sharpe’s book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Positioning herself in the wake of slavery, Sharpe offers anti-colonial methods of ethical viewing practices, or as she writes: “toward seeing and reading otherwise, toward reading and seeing something in excess of what is in the frame” (117). This “otherwise” is a kind of refusal, a practice which tackles the assaults on Black life and counters the legacy of antiblackness. While we may be accustomed to the practice of redaction concerning government documents, Black redaction exploits and celebrates visibility with silence, making alternative viewpoints public instead of obscuring them.  

I argue that Miller’s typographic choices work at the interstices of silence, or redaction, and visibility, or annotation, to rupture our view. With each repetition of the story in the titular sequence, fewer and fewer selections are highlighted, progressively obscuring the original text. The final poem reads, “Here where Blossoms the night”—beginning by borrowing the “H” and “er” in “Hanover” and ending using the “ght” from the “fighting dogs.” A new narrative is created from identical source material with each selection transforming history and journalism into visual poetry. A riff on the visual poem opening his essay collection, these newspaper-poems are markedly thinking about space. However, instead of experimenting with textual size and space, their focus is color and its absence. With Miller’s meditationon silences and white space, publications such as Jamaica Star, Jamaica Supreme Court Criminal Appeal, McKoy’s News, Loop Jamaica, and Radio Jamaica News and their iterations, become visual poetry. And these newspaper-poems take up the silences subsumed by the nearby bushes and retell these stories. Adding emphasis and blurring select details, I see the work as poetic instead of purely historical, providing a referent and so making “some— / thing torn // and new” (Brathwaite 270). This kind of writing aligns with Kamau Brathwaite’s poetics, not only in its play with textual space but also in its interest in Caribbean placemaking in the wake of slavery. While Brathwaite notably composes this image to metaphorize the process of creolization, blending and weaving old roots with new traditions, what happens when this simultaneous tearing/destruction and production/generation is manifested materially? 

Miller’s work does not seek to physically shred newspapers, but it is an invitation to ponder white spaces, textually and otherwise. Considering Miller’s meditation on “the silence— // this terrible white // space” in Things I Have Withheld, a fascinating detail is that these newspaper-poem redactions cannot be found in the table of contents. These silences function as an enactment of placeless-ness—that is, an indeterminable space or location, an almost there or ‘round the corner, and otherwise, etc. These poems and histories are—especially in the case of the first five pages of the “In Nearby Bushes” sequence—in a silence, in a white space, echoing things that have been withheld.

The management of identity and visibility is an overt way Miller engages Black death. A nod to Black redaction is made on the very first page of the poem series, insofar as the name of the victim is literally redacted with the use of six successive lowercase x’s: “xxxxxx” (Miller 43). Yet a deeper look reveals that “x” both marks and conceals. This usage works to show respect and offer dignity to the woman discarded in the real and symbolic bushes: “What is it called — the nameless space between, as if nothing / important happened here. As if no one important happened here” (Miller 36). In this way, her legacy is shifted from the placeless place of the nearby bushes to an otherwise, richly unsilenced space in the x’s. This richness lends itself to Miller’s textual reimagining and re-imaging of the newspaper’s report. His newspaper-poems refuse the detached journalistic voice with the text itself—using color gradations to produce various versions of the story and a different lens with which to view Black life and death.

We might consider the typographical play with the newspapers as redaction and the work of (re)defining as annotation. A striking and relevant intervention Miller offers in this stead is his meditation on the word “autoclaps,” which appears in his 2016 novel, Augustown. Miller’s novel weaves a tragically triumphant story of the community of August Town, centered around the acclaimed and enigmatic spiritual leader, Alexander Bedward, and following the reverberations of his radical sociopolitical ruptures from 1920 to the 1980s. Augustown opens with the promise of “the terrible thing,” a thing that becomes synonymous with the term “autoclaps” (Miller 5). The narrator supplies the reader with definitions and reflections on this Jamaican word: “A strange word, autoclaps … It’s not the kind of word you will find the Oxford dictionary. But maybe if you were lucky enough to find a dictionary that has in it blackpeople’s words, then the entry for autoclaps would read something like this …” (Miller 103). With a disputed etymology, “autoclaps” is layered with many meanings, versions, and intentions. From calamity to heartache with inflections of Greek, German, and Jamaican language, the multiplicity of the word is reflected even in the form it is defined. The imagined dictionary definitions of this slippery term appearin Miller’s novel as:

The repeated revision of the term, shifting with each definition, plays on and with the very act of defining by annotating the “original” with new versions and variations. This technique of defining and redefining is markedly creative; it invokes dialogue, simile, rhetorical questions, and repetition. These annotations cause ’ruption as they fracture the impact of “sharp white backgrounds” (Hurston 153).

The imagined dictionary which defines words like “autoclaps” ruptures and collapses the knowledge systems and logics of the Oxford dictionaries, archives, and newspapers. All of Miller’s dictionary entries are like an autoclaps; in fact, “autoclaps” is annotation and redaction working together. This iteration of autoclaps is not from an apocalyptic destruction or even the collapse of one’s heart, but we might understand it more generously by reading it alongside Black annotation and redaction. “Autoclaps” is mobilized in a productive way, towards a destruction of ideas and ideals that harm Black life and living and foreground the silence. For Miller, this practice is intimately linked to place and landscape and is not limited to this novel but is also found quite prominently in Miller’s poetry collection, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (2014).

The main narrative interspersed throughout The Cartographer in a 27-poem sequence is an extended dialogue between a cartographer and a Rastaman, who each have different ideological stances to mapping. Yet between these conversations appear another sequence focused on the Jamaican landscape aptly called “Place Names.” The Place Name sequence addresses the peculiar histories of places named and renamed in response to colonial and postcolonial moments. Miller creatively locates “Me-No-Sen-You-No-Come” in the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The speaker of the poem draws parallels between the circumstances of the naming of “Me-No-Sen-You-No-Come” and its implications with the intrusion of Goldilocks into the “house of bears,” that is: “In plain english: do not enter without invitation” (Miller 26). The format of the “Place Name” sequence is presented as dictionary entries, implying a definitive meaning, but subverting and mocking the format of (Western) epistemology—in effect, redefining and rewriting the Jamaican landscape. The poem ends with a qualifying statement: “just know that this ground, these / bushes, these trees observe you with suspicion many / centuries deep” (my emphasis) (Miller 26). In this poetic imagination, time is collapsed and condensed, and Goldilocks’ presence not only impacts the landscape of “Me-No-Sen”, but the landscape redefines her as “rude pickney” and recasts the ostensibly innocent blonde girl in the position of the colonizer.

Miller’s poetics of inverted views, thus, illustrates how the bushes can produce alternatives as they are personified, observing the trespassers, rather than being relegated to a passive place inscribed with violence. What is unique about this iteration is this place is not quite a place, insofar as it is a space of “refuge that evade[s] the colonial order” (Goffe 10). In her article “Unmapping the Caribbean,” Goffe supplements the toponymic history: “This now-extinct village settlement was established and named by runaways fleeing enslavement on plantations in the parish of Trelawny in 1812.” Now absorbed into the more recognizable Aberdeen area of Trelawny, the archetypal cartographer, Rastaman, and even Goldilocks enter and are made visible in this landscape through the suspicion of the bushes—a practice of autoclaps/afterclap, a rupture of colonial and plantation logic where the Black background is foregrounded.

Miller’s reference to bushes extends the “Place Names” sequence from Cartographer to “Place Name: Oracabessa –”, part of the poetic sequence entitled ‘Sometimes I Consider the Names of Places,’ in the collection In Nearby Bushes. The mock dictionary entry opens with a caveat: “origins disputed but most likely leave-over from the / Spanish” (Miller 34). A much longer form than the autoclaps/afterclap and “Me-No-Sen-You-No-Come,” this meditation on Oracabessa thinks multilingually and speculatively about origins. From the whimsical wanderings of Goldilocks to the linguistic and etymological layers of Christopher Columbus’ search for gold in “Oracabessa –”, Miller’s work is interested in annotating and redacting the “completeness of genocide” on several planes (Miller 34). The poet disputes the silences and erasures located in the white (golden) spaces, inverting them to illuminate the Black background for those willing to open their eyes wider. Places like Me-No-Sen-You-No-Come and Oracabessa are multivalent in their localities, retaining histories and memories otherwise rendered invisible. Playing with color, legibility and identity, Miller showcases an alternative layer of the Jamaican landscape.

“In nearby bushes” transforms from a trite, commonplace term too often heard on Jamaican evening news to a richly dense landscape that embeds theoretical and material practices of decolonial praxis. Considering how place and placemaking can be a violence, even apocalyptic, Miller scars the sharp white background of the page and visualizes Black life and Black death through alternative lenses. Negotiating Blackness with the ink on the page, his work illustrates how the textual becomes political. Miller’s body of work showcases a careful, critical engagement with legibility, identity, landscape and (hi)stories in Caribbean poetry and poetics, bringing a nuanced meaning to “something torn and new.”    

                                     

Works Cited

Brathwaite, Kamau. “Jou’vert,” The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. Oxford University Press, 1973, pp. 267-270.
Goffe, Tao Leigh. “Unmapping the Caribbean: Toward a Digital Praxis of Archipelagic Sounding.” archipelagoes 5, December 2020, pp. 1-23.
Hurston, Zora Neale. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, Feminist Press, 1979, pp. 152–5.
Miller, Kei. Augustown: A Novel. Pantheon Books, 2017.
Miller, Kei. The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. Carcanet Press Ltd., 2014.
Miller, Kei. In Nearby Bushes. Carcanet Press Ltd., 2019.
Miller, Kei. Things I Have Withheld: Essays. Canongate Books Ltd., 2021.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.

Read more in this issue: Interview | Poems | Writing Prompt

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Samantha Stephens is a PhD candidate in English and a Doctoral Fellow in Caribbean Literatures, Arts and Cultures at the University of Virginia. Working in the fields of Caribbean Studies and Digital Humanities, her research focuses on Caribbean poetry and poetics with attention to visual experimentation in the digital age. She has published on the typographic innovations of Kei Miller and Olive Senior’s poetry in the Journal of West Indian Literature. Her interest in Black feminist technologies and Caribbean digital archival methods propel her current project, in which she blends literary and artistic practices to reimagine Black Caribbean pasts and futures.