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

An Interview with Gabrielle Bates

Gabrielle Bates is the author of the poetry collection Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023), a New York Times ‘The Shortlist’ pick and a Chicago Review of Books ‘must-read’ book of 2023. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Bates currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon, and teaches occasionally through the University of Washington Rome Center and Tin House Writers’ Workshops, among other universities and arts organizations. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter: @GabrielleBates

We published your poem, “Monologue with a Flat Hand,” in vol. XXXVII no. 1 in the Fall of 2016 which eventually appeared in your debut full-length collection Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023) under the title, “Should the First Calf of Winter Be White, You’re Going to Hate.” The poem changed quite a bit before the recent publication in your collection. How do you negotiate that need for revision after initial publication?

That poem tortured me! Before Mid-American Review published a version of it, and for years afterward, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the poem had a lot of potential, if I could just figure out what it wanted to do or say—something about it was eluding me. I wish I could pull that issue off the shelf and compare the two versions, because I don’t remember exactly what all I changed between the journal and the book publications—I know I changed the ending (and the title obviously) but there are other moments too, I’m sure, that are different!—but I’m house-sitting right now, so I don’t have access to the original. 

It doesn’t matter if a poem has already been published or not; if I sense a way to make it more alive and resonant, I make those changes. Just because I’ve published a poem doesn’t mean the poem has found its most energetic language or form. In fact, it’s often only after I’ve published a poem in a journal that I see places where I could cut back and release more energy into the poem. 

You have a very extensive list of publications in the acknowledgements of Judas Goat. When do you know a poem is ready to go out as a submission to literary magazines/journals?

My approach throughout my twenties—the decade I was working on Judas Goat—was “throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.” I’d write, workshop, revise, and then send a poem out to journals in a fairly speedy cycle. Sometimes way too speedily: I’d write a draft and send it out almost immediately, awash in the creation afterglow, though I always regretted that later. In general I thought: If an editor thinks it’s good enough to publish, it must be. Who am I to say or know when a poem is “done” or “good enough”? In my early twenties especially, I was anxious for others to tell me about my work and its worth. I believed myself too ignorant to perform that role reliably for myself. And because I was a young, unknown writer from Alabama, who didn’t go to NYU or anything like that, I felt like I could trust editors to judge my work on its own merits. I don’t feel that way anymore (I have trust issues!), so I haven’t been submitting much at all since I finished Judas Goat. I’m trying to slow down and hone my intuition about when poems are ready to live in the world outside of me. 

When do you know a poem needs to stop being submitted for publication?

If I’ve pushed a poem as far as I can, and I believe in it (a rare occurrence), and a trusted friend has read it and told me they love it, then I will never stop submitting it. Otherwise, I tend to stop submitting a poem once I’ve realized it’s not done or alive enough to be worth putting out into the world. 

How do you find the final shape a poem aches to be?

Oh, I love the verb “aches” here. So interesting—poem framed as a living being, capable of ache. I try to find a poem’s most-alive shape by employing an alchemy of time, reading aloud, and sharing with trusted readers for feedback. Often the first interesting sentence or line of a draft will carry a clue for me in regards to how the poem as a whole wants to approach lineation and stanza, like a blueprint.  

The writing and publishing process takes time as we published your poem in 2016 which then later appeared in your collection in 2023. How long did the process take from the moment you realized you had a book, to submitting your manuscript for publication?

Someone advised me to start submitting my first-book manuscript before I thought it was fully ready, so I did that for a few years, using contest deadlines as a prod to try and wrangle what I had into book-length shape. I felt close to having the manuscript done for years, but it wasn’t until after I had the book deal with Tin House, and after I’d gone through some final editing rounds with my editor Alyssa Ogi that I actually felt the book was ready to publish. 

Some of us are, pathologically, never content with what we’ve made; it’s a constant push and pull between honoring the hopes and standards we have for art, while not becoming overly precious or private about it. 

What most surprised you after your debut published?

Anytime a person I don’t know posts something insightful about Judas Goat on the internet, I’m shocked. I’m like: How did the book even find its way to you?! The population of people who buy and read contemporary poetry collections in the U.S. is fairly miniscule, compared to other genres especially, and yet Judas Goat has ended up in places I never expected—It’s all very wild and surprising to me. The most surprising moment was probably when Jorie Graham said kind words about my book on Twitter. I’ve never met her and had zero reason to believe the collection would be on her radar at all. Still doesn’t feel real.

How has your relationship with Judas Goat changed since first holding a copy of the book in your hands and seeing it out in the world?

The book publishing process, like any major life event, is full of emotional vertigo, moments where you think you’re supposed to feel one way, and you actually feel another way. I panicked when I saw my book in person for the first time, I’ll be real with you. I thought: This is it? and then: WHAT HAVE I DONE. I don’t feel that way anymore, luckily. Friends and generous, thoughtful readers have helped me step into a more celebratory mode around the book. I wouldn’t say I feel detached from it now, but I feel more detached than I did when I held it for the first time—in a healthy way.

The first poem in Judas Goat titled “The Dog” is shocking with its unforgiving portrayal of the violence we cause. The poems in the collection keep returning to this motif of violence and ruin; however, there are also intimate moments within the collection like in the poem, “The Greatest Show on Earth.” What is the relationship between the violence and the more intimate moments within the collection?

I’m interested in what happens in the small theaters of life, where there are very few witnesses; when private, intimate moments and conversations are imagined or dramatized and made public, through art, that’s really interesting and evocative for me. There’s an inherent tension. In juxtaposing or otherwise engaging aspects of violence and intimacy, I think I was trying to understand something about my relationship to vigilance, abandon, and risk. 

Many of your poems reference mythical, fairytale, and religious figures such as Eurydice, Gretel, and Mary all of whom you give voice or space within the collection. How have these women impacted your life and your writing?

I’m interested in the ways stories shape our lives. Fairytales and myths from various traditions have always haunted me, particularly the stories about young women in danger, which felt designed to teach me something about what it meant to be a young woman in danger. 

Judas Goat is such a stunning collection full of poems that are both inviting and frustrating which, I feel, the best poems usually are. What makes a poem for you?

What makes a poem, for me, on the most basic level, is a surprising and evocative progression lines. My favorite poems impart both clarity and mystery—Reading them, I feel something intense, but I also don’t quite know exactly what just happened to me, or what I’ve taken from it. I love that tension between vividness and endless interpretation, vulnerability and privacy. “Both inviting and frustrating”! I love that you said that. There is an element of frustration, isn’t there? Frustration keeps me alive, keeps me writing. It’s a form of closeness, and a kind of belief.

***

––Tyler Michael Jacobs, Blog Co-Editor

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

An Interview with Nebraska State Poet Matt Mason

Matt Mason has run poetry workshops in Botswana, Romania, Nepal, and Belarus for the U.S. State Department and his poetry has appeared in The New York Times. Matt is the Nebraska State Poet and has received a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Nebraska Arts Council. His work can be found on NPR’s Morning Edition, in American Life in Poetry, and in several hundred other publications. Mason’s 4th book, At the Corner of Fantasy and Main: Disneyland, Midlife and Churros, was released by The Old Mill Press in 2022. Find more at: https://matt.midverse.com/

You’ve served as Nebraska State Poet since 2019 and the position is a five-year appointment. How have your efforts as the Nebraska State Poet shifted, evolved, or surprised you despite the challenges surrounding the pandemic?

Well, yes, the main challenge is right there: the pandemic. My plan as State Poet has been to bring poetry events physically into all 93 of Nebraska’s counties. That seemed reasonable at first and then a bit impractical. Even so, I’m catching up and still have a shot before I’m done. During lockdowns, I shifted a lot of what I do to online appearances, which was okay but I definitely prefer being in a room with people to talk about poetry: it’s much more rewarding and effective, but you do what you can. I also made a major life shift by leaving my salaried nonprofit position to try and make my living as a writer and speaker. One year in, that plan is still going but I’m not sure how far, ultimately, it can go. So wish me luck…

Are you looking forward to a second term as Nebraska State Poet and how do you see the Poetry Pen Pal Program evolving into your second term, or beyond?

Right now, I actually feel that I might only serve one term. This position has been good for me in terms of exposure and I feel more Nebraska poets should benefit from it. And even if I’m not a CURRENT State Poet, I’ll always have been one and have that credibility, so I feel it will still help me as I’m not about to stop this kind of work which I’ve been doing since way before being named State Poet. The Poetry Pen Pal Program is one I’d love to continue, but it will need a new funding source. The program allowed me to go into communities around the state for a couple days with 2 other poets traveling with me, and it existed thanks to funding from the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation along with help from Humanities Nebraska, but it was part of a one-time fellowship.

How was it getting the opportunity to share the stage and have a conversation with U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón?

Oh, you know my answer: it was fantastic. It was my first time meeting Ada and she was nothing but wonderful. Add on to that how her event packed the Holland Center, a huge venue in Omaha. On this side of lockdowns, poetry audiences have struggled, so that was encouraging to see.

Since we published your poem “Mistranslating Neruda” back in the Fall of 2001 in vol. XXII no. 1, how has your relationship with submitting to literary magazines changed as your career has grown and evolved?

It’s really waxed and waned, mostly depending how organized I am in that particular month or year. I still do it about the same: getting poems out in bursts, then not sending anything out for stretches. One good thing now is that I get more requests from magazines to send them work in the first place. That’s a real honor (and the acceptance rate is a LOT higher that way as even State Poets still get plenty of rejections).

Your collections The Baby That Ate Cincinnati (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2013), I Have a Poem the Size of the Moon (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2020), and At the Corner of Fantasy and Main: Disneyland, Midlife and Churros (The Old Mill Press, 2022) are all very focused on their respective themes: parenthood, Nebraska, and Disneyland. When you’re compiling a collection, do you approach it with themes in mind or do you discover those themes as the collection begins to take shape?

Yes, having a theme helps me organize the poems. My first book was much more scattered, but I still worked in a loose theme to help me select the poems and put them together. Those next three were much more centered and it helps me to work that way.

Will Rock Stars (Button Poetry, 2023) be a departure from such focused, themed collections?

Nope, it’s largely around the theme of “Rock Stars,” mainly with poems about 80s rockers, English Romantic poets, and others we might call a rock star.

You have had a fairly prolific few years having published three collections since 2020 and two back-to-back in 2022 and the forthcoming Rock Stars expected in September 2023. What effect does publishing so many collections so quickly have on your writing?

Actually, not a lot. For more than 30 years now, I’ve had a deadline to start at least one new poem each week, so I have a lot of poems. And when I type up the handwritten poems, I sort them into files based on themes, so books like Rock Stars and I Have a Poem the Size of the Moon have poems written over decades collected together in those folders. So I’m writing probably the same amount but I’m now benefiting from having more recognition as well as a large number of poems consistently written and worked on. It’s all in the poetry long game.

There was a gap between publishing your second full-length collection The Baby That Ate Cincinnati and your third full-length collection I Have a Poem the Size of the Moon. How did you spend the seven years between publishing those two manuscripts?

Like I said in the last question, the writing itself followed about the same schedule. In those years, though, I did a lot of poetry education work around the state with the Nebraska Arts Council, Humanities Nebraska and others as well as also seeing the nonprofit Nebraska Writers Collective, which I led until 2022, expand incredibly with the work it does in high schools, middle schools and correctional facilities. I also had a 2-week residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts where, instead of writing new poems, my focus was to gather poems into manuscript shape. That’s where I Have a Poem the Size of the Moon came into shape as well as parts of Rock Stars and at least 2 others I’m working on now.

Your poems seem to be rooted in Nebraska in some way or another, has that been a conscious decision of yours throughout your career or has Nebraska just been a place that lets itself in while you’re writing?

Sort of, I tend to write about what’s around me, so Nebraska is what I tend to be swimming in. Even the Disneyland book has a good deal of Nebraska in it!

What advice might you have for emerging poets?

Let yourself reinvent what a poem is. Don’t worry too much about what you’ve been told poetry is supposed to be, let yourself write the poems you wish you read more of in classes or on your own (even if you’re not sure if those are even poems or not).

***

––Tyler Michael Jacobs, Blog Co-Editor

What We’re Reading, with Assistant Editor Mays Kuhail

I’ve been enjoying reading more poetry over the summer, and I’ve recently picked up If They Come for Us, a raw and poignant collection by Fatimah Asghar. I was instantly drawn to the rich themes of South-Asian culture, identity, and the undeniable link between past and present in the effects of political turmoil and violence. Asghar employs varied forms in this collection featuring both lyrical free verse as well as more experimental forms. I was especially intrigued by the creative experimentation which I thought worked really well with the themes Asghar taps into.  In “Microaggression Bingo,” Asghar contrasts intense and complex notions of Western microaggressions with a simpler bingo card form, many of which ring true in terms of one’s ability to address such statements and actions. In “Script for Child Services: A Floor Plan,” Asghar lays out her poem as a floor plan to portray being an orphan in the foster care system. I don’t think I’ve seen innovative forms like the ones Asghar makes use of. The collection is also a very informative one and builds on other intersectional struggles which share common themes and hardships. I often found myself having to pause to put the collection down and take in the work. It can be a quick read, but I held onto the collection for a couple of weeks to make sure I was able to grant each poem enough time and thought and to connect recurring threads anchoring the work, especially with more haunting and complex pieces.

—Mays Kuhail, Mid-American Review