Speaking the unspeakable
Evie Shockley burns up the page with her new collection, “semiautomatic.” Ablaze with wordplay and formal ingenuity, her poems chronicle the horrors of the 21st century while igniting the imagination as an act of hope. One of the most innovative poets writing today, Shockley creates her own style of poetic collage, remixing sources both musical and historical: from Prince to Amiri Baraka, Rihanna to the Occupy Movement, Nina Simone to “The Odyssey.” Her lines take shape as sonnets and quizzes, narrative sequences and nutritional labels. As in her previous book, “the new black,” Shockley reckons with the past to illuminate the contemporary moment — racial, political, deeply personal — and becomes a kind of oracle in the process.
“Semiautomatic” refers to the assault weapon, but also to our habitual response to violence: outrage, mourning, despair, then outrage again, a cycle endlessly repeating. To break the cycle, Shockley refuses silence and renders grief into song. Dedicated to the three founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, “semiautomatic” sings elegies for unjustly slain African Americans, moving from blues to ballad and back: “black blood’s highly combustible,/under conditions of sufficient pressure,” she observes. Her unflinching poems speak of “the worst brutalities” — to black people, to girls and women, to the poor, to the Earth — while affirming our common humanity. Shockley wants to cut through our “climate of indifference.” She exposes the crime of young girls being sex-trafficked (“The Nation’s Plague in Plain Sight”), records the tsunami’s radioactive aftershocks (“fukushima blues”), and weaves electoral hatred with global warming: “turns out the earth had a heart and it was melting.”
Her method of remix juxtaposes voices and sources from past and present, fiction and journalism. Studying antebellum literature, she rescues the young slave girl Topsy from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” transplants her into the absurdity of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, a surreal world where the white queen rules and “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Paired with haunting illustrations by Alison Saar, the Topsy poems trap us in the looking-glass dread of today’s racial oppressions. Although Shockley never spares her readers, she gives us pause from the violence, offers moments of tenderness, humor and “reciprocal dreaming.” “semiautomatic” is a 21st century survival guide, fierce and full of compassion.
Nicole Sealey proves herself a decisive new talent in her full-length debut, “Ordinary Beast.” Formally agile, Sealey’s poems alternately sear and shine, revealing her keen intellect and existential vision. Born in St. Thomas and raised in Florida, Sealey now lives in New York and directs the Cave Canem Foundation. Her restive poems range over the globe, grounded in history and culture but luminous with emotional imagery. “What I’d like is to be white/ as the unsparing light at tunnel’s end,” she writes in “Legendary,” a sonnet sequence spoken by transgender performers in “Paris Is Burning,” a documentary film about drag in 1980s Harlem. Sealey captures the drag queens’ voices in all their pageantry and longing, reimagines them as both extraordinary and profoundly human. Her empathy unfolds in short lines and clear syntax, a spaciousness of language and thought.
Sealey’s intricate forms include a sestina, a cento and an erasure, as well as the ingenious form she invented, the obverse. In “Candelabra With Heads,” she describes with urgency a Hirschhorn installation at the Tate: “this brood of mannequins, cocooned/ and mounted on a wooden scaffold,” bringing the reader into the experience of witness. “Can you see them hanging?” she asks, then implicates us in the atrocity on display: memory of bodies burning, the shadow of America’s lynchings repeated as the poem reverses itself, replays each line backward until the final thesis. Sealey is compelled by the act of construction, whether on the page, at an art gallery, or in Nigeria, where townspeople build a mansion out of dirt and clay, dedicated to a deity. “I want/ to learn how to make something/ holy, then walk away,” she declares — her creative mission statement and the triumph of “Ordinary Beast.” The book ends in intimacy, in bed with the beloved. In the face of injustice and suffering, she tenders the brief flame of human love.
Intimacy is at the heart of James Crews’ prize-winning second collection, “Telling My Father.” I read this book fast, like drinking a glass of spring water in the early morning. The poems trembled like first light on a calm surface — no showy linguistic tricks, just lyric moments, a life revealed in its imperfection and grace. Crews consumes the natural world with a sensual hunger, dipping his Mason jar into a melting lake, lying shirtless in a patch of clover, eating “half a jar of raw honey, amber-gold/ as an autumn sunset.” He explores estuaries and rivers, traces a comet’s trail and a heron’s lift-off, imagines the first kiss of “two men in a fire-lit cave,” scented with mint and beeswax.
Crews threads these contemplations with personal history — the early death of his father, a legacy of loss that frames and guides the book. In the title poem, what is “told” remains unspoken in plain language but emerges in glimpses: the father sipping morning coffee, appraising his son home late from a club, “the reek/ of my smoke, traces of last night’s/eyeliner I decided not to wipe off this time.” Such scenes are powerful for their precision and vulnerability, like the obligatory last kiss in the hospital bed, the father’s cold forehead. Grief inhabits these poems but a spiritual presence illuminates them. God is everywhere in “Telling My Father” — in a strain of weed called “god bud,” in a lover’s tattooed skin, in the dead father’s visitation at the son’s wrecked truck, in the rasp of rustling trees. Love and desire, birth and death, the wild and the human entwine in this collection, distilled with sacred light, “a revelation we will/ always be trying to decipher.”