On Renia White’s Casual Conversation

Casual Conversation by Renia White. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd. 2022. 80 pages. $17.00. Paperback.

Although I usually don’t have much patience for poetic metaphysics, the abstraction common in Casual Conversation didn’t keep me from effortlessly gliding from poem to poem. I can recall very few collections I’ve enjoyed that passed through the same zip code as words like “epistemology,” but Renia White had me in a chokehold when, in the beginning of “I am not prepared for the inverse of this,” she observed, “how dangerous a logic we’ve made // proof is what happens afterward, to show us / the during was true.” The first half of this poem is completely abstract, yet White’s sharp, clean verse clears and composes such a vivid scene of concepts that it felt complete.

Imagery is scarce in Casual Conversation (with some stunning exceptions, such as “all over, but only here.”) Instead, the poetry sustains itself by the natural roll of thought through white space, line breaks, and stanzas. These are skillfully applied to incite rhythmic pauses in the reader for a steady momentum. 

This is not to say that Casual Conversation exclusively generalizes. While the collection offers a bird’s eye view of racism, brutality, incarceration, it is punctuated by poignant specificity. In the final poem of the first section, “some plans should be thwarted,” the speaker requests, “I wanna live real quick.” She is immediately shown “the way to tilt toward unending” (another example of her killer abstract language) and this plea for life is fulfilled throughout the following section. 

The middle section “lives” as an individual Black woman (and girl) anchored to the American landscape of flippant and brutal racism. Yet tender moments of kinship and joy pepper this chapter. I’m very fond of the connection forged in “in the name of half-sistering” ––“build a wedge called daddy and gulf us / in the name of your stolen thing,” she challenges a playground antagonist, “a sister ain’t a partial feeling. she so mine, we so sistered.” 

The arguments in these poems are clear, weighty, and impactful, whether they are grandiose or personal. Again, I am not typically fond of its rhetorical delivery method, but Casual Conversation shines in its abstractions. It thrives not by flourishes of language so much as careful manipulations of it, by the clarity of its thought. While my feet barely touched the concrete on my trip through Casual Conversations, I was surprised to find that I did not miss it.

––Jamie Manias, Mid-American Review

On Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black

Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. New York, NY. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. 2018. 192 pages. $14.99. Paperback.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black contains no shortage of absurd realities, and yet not one of them feels distant from our own. The stories in this collection are ultra-violent. Their characters are either on the brink, in the commission, or sweating through the aftermath of vicious acts of cruelty. They frequently explore the conflation of justice with violence in the United States and the necessity of violence to achieve justice that won’t be granted otherwise. In one story, five black children are grotesquely beheaded by a white father who claims they endangered him and his family. He is subsequently exonerated. This leads various black individuals across the nation to repeat the violence suffered by the innocent “Finkelstein 5” against white people who, for the first time, must associate fear with their skin color. Another story depicts a theme park called “Zimmerland” that allows its guests to practice their “problem-solving, justice, and judgment” by exposing them to real world conflicts. However, instead of practicing justice, Zimmerland’s guests return again and again to practice violence, especially racially-motivated violence, and they can’t be banned because they’ve made the whole endeavor profitable by their constant patronage. That is perhaps the most insightful throughline in Adjei-Brenyah’s stories; even when individuals don’t want to commit or enable acts of violence, the incentives of capitalism make it too enticing.

This phenomenon is most evident in the collection’s three connected stories: “Friday Black,” “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing,” and “In Retail.” The first depicts an outdoor apparel outlet in a mall on America’s famously gory holiday, Black Friday. Customers become zombies, unable to communicate and willing to kill anyone between them and their half-price fleeces. Employees are no better; though they retain normal speech, they’ve become unfeeling in their competition to sell the most jackets. The narrator uses an eight-foot metal pole to “smack down Friday heads” and to push trampled bodies out of the aisles. The second connected story is less violent, but it reveals another sick aspect of capitalist transactions: the corruption of empathy. The same narrator snickers with a female customer as they watch her husband struggle out of a jacket, and when she turns around he looks at the husband “like, Women, am I right?” He makes each of them feel understood while inside, he only sees them as another sale. The final of these three stories begins with a mode of escape from the hell of the mall: a cashier at “Taco Town” leaps from the fourth floor balcony. Adjei-Brenyah’s stories are not always hopeless. His characters tell jokes in literally humorless worlds. They work together to prevent a mass shooting. But they rarely achieve hope, nor justice, without violence along the way.

––Dan Marcantuono, Fiction editor, Mid-American Review

On Dustin Pearson’s A Season in Hell with Rimbaud

A Season in Hell with Rimbaud by Dustin Pearson. Rochester, NY. BOA Editions, Ltd. 2022. 96 pages. $17.00. Paperback.

Dustin Pearson’s collection A Season in Hell with Rimbaud finds itself in conversation with Rimbaud and influenced by Dante as the speaker goes on a Dantean journey through Hell in search of his brother. Despite the influence of tradition that is evoked throughout Pearson’s poetics, this collection reexamines the Hell narrative as the Hell lyric that navigates a relationship between brothers and questions the world at both a beginning and an ending. Pearson’s Hell becomes both grotesque and dreamlike that leaves the reader questioning how much is dream and how much is Hell. The poems in this collection also explore who we are to another, or who others are to us.

“Who in your life would you walk through fire for?” asks Pearson’s speaker in the first of two poems titled, “Things I’ve Thought, Things I Do.” The speaker is asking this question of his brother; however, the poet also acknowledges the reader and asks them to ponder this question of themselves, too. The speaker’s own vulnerabilities are put on full display throughout the poem when Pearson writes, “The thought of asking that question used to bother me, having to listen to a list that didn’t include me, // or thinking the one name you’d say wouldn’t be mine.” In the final section of the poem, the speaker begins to confront their own fears, “Brother, I never thought my answer would be you. I’m not disappointed like I thought I’d be.” This poem becomes an acknowledgement of love, but it’s hard to not feel the sadness with which it leaves the reader, too.

This prosaic diptych of poems becomes a sort of confessional refrain after the second “Things I’ve Thought, Things I Do” builds upon the first which helps to anchor the book. The repetition allows the speaker to negotiate the Hellscape Pearson offers to his readers through the speaker’s search of understanding not only their brother, but themself. These sectional poems offer a breadth of space on the page as the speaker searches inward, “These days when I sift through the past like this, when you’re lying next to me on the bed before you’re lost again, I’m trying to tell you what I will miss.” This final line of “Things I’ve Thought, Things I Do” guts the reader with the speaker’s raw confession, once again, to their brother and leaves the reader contemplating their own histories, relationships, and what they are unwilling or unable to say.

Pearson’s speaker remains confessional and vulnerable within these poems. However, at times, this confession leaves the inner exploration of the speaker and feels as if the poet is speaking directly to the reader. “The World at Its Beginning” leaves readers with a tenderness. In it, Pearson’s speaker concludes: “I tell myself / I’d follow him anywhere / to keep the world / from ending.”

The last four lines of “The World at Its Beginning”––and the last four lines of Pearson’s Hell Lyric––become a compassionate reach from the speaker to his brother, from the poet to the reader. The poet is prevalent throughout the invention that is this collection which makes for another juxtaposition of speaker and poet. With the diptych of poems “Things I’ve Thought, Things I Do” and the final poem “The World at Its Beginning,” the self-searching chants through the outward compassion and both juxtapose the darker images that wander through many of the other poems in the collection. The speaker has been giving us the vulnerabilities, but it is the poet who has given us the realization of the final lines that end this collection. Dustin Pearson’s A Season in Hell with Rimbaud is an epic lyric worth entering Hell for.

––Tyler Michael Jacobs, Blog Co-Editor

Book Review: Our Wives Under The Sea

Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield. Flatiron Books, 2022. 240 pages. $16.73, paperback.

Our Wives Under The Sea is the lesbian ocean horror book I didn’t know I needed. Julia Armfield’s brilliant debut novel centers around the relationship between Miri and her wife Leah, after Leah returns from a six month deep sea submarine mission which was only supposed to last three weeks. While Leah was under, Miri was unable to communicate with her or even confirm she was still alive. While she is relieved her wife returns, Miri soon discovers that the ocean has changed Leah. Though they spend all their time together in the same apartment, Leah is unable to really connect with Miri about what happened and spends all of her time running the taps in their bathroom. As we move through the novel, each section titled after one of the four layers of the ocean, we alternate between Miri and Leah’s perspectives, learning about the intricacies of their relationship, the grief that comes from the loss of intimacy, and the truth about what Leah experienced under the sea.

Not only is this book a beautiful exploration of queer longing between two women, it’s also about the queer longing which has always been deeply tied to the sea. The whole novel works to beautifully highlight and reaffirm the many truths of the ocean. The ocean is shelter. The ocean is dangerous. The ocean is possibility. The ocean is a haunted house. The ocean is queer. The ocean is our mother. These truths and this book broke me open and I encourage you all to let it do the same for you.

—Gen Greer, MAR

Review: Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World by Pádraig Ó’Tuama

Poetry Unbound: 50 Poem to Open Your World by Pádraig Ó’Tuama. W.W. Norton & Company. 384 pages. $22.99, hardcover.

On Being Studio’s podcast Poetry Unbound, hosted by Pádraig Ó’Tuama and first broadcast early in 2020, sets a high bar for all poetry media. It is gently-voiced, ceaselessly generous in its readings, and effortlessly vulnerable. Ó’Tuama’s essays on the poems he chose are a gift, and one which leads listeners to find themselves in poetry. In each episode, Ó’Tuama presents a poem then speaks both personally and critically to its merits and its stake in the world. Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World follows the podcast’s same formula. Whether written or spoken, Ó’Tuama’s essays on this anthology’s 50 poems—from poets like Kaveh Akbar, Ada Limón, and Tracy K. Smith—comes across with a prayer-like sense of devotion to the medium. This is a gracious anthology, a true labor of love, and a testament to poetry’s reach that celebrates each word of every poem. 

I first came to Poetry Unbound during the COVID lockdown of early 2020. By that point in my life, I had lost interest in opening myself up to what poetry could teach me. Poetry Unbound became an invitation to remember how poetry can be at once meaningful, devastating, and beautiful. I feel that my creative writing life since coming to Poetry Unbound is indebted to this series, and I still often turn to this book, and the podcast to which it owes its title, any time I feel a need for inspiration or grace. There is a wonderfully intimate feel to this anthology, as Ó’Tuama’s essays in both book and podcast form are, first and foremost, points of personal connection. At the same time, they invite readers and listeners into a world of utmost faith in what poets have to offer us. Some of my favorite poems and essays from this anthology are on James Wright’s “A Blessing,” Margaret Atwood’s “All Bread,” and Dilruba Ahmed’s “Phase One.” Any time your passion for writing or faith in poetry wanes, turn to this book. Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World offers a terrific balm to any hurt, and undoubtedly keeps its title’s promise. 

—Samuel Burt, MAR