“Remember the ritual of trying, falling, the get up and the dust off. In fact, there is enough variety and musicality here that Jacobson, who blurbed the book, compared it to a mixtape, which I find delightful.įor the title of this blog post I quoted the first poem in Brown’s book, the wonderfully titled “Hourglass Flow,” which starts out as a meditation on the difficulty of sitting down to write and winds up thusly: He celebrates a whole wide rainbow of blackness, and yes, he makes reference to MF Doom and J-Dilla and delivers a rollicking, loving tribute to Bonita Applebum, the (fictional?) sexy lady from the Tribe Called Quest song. There’s even a poem about the nerdy pleasures of playing D&D (and being the only Black kid at the table). Brown riffs on romance, favorite songs and beloved poets.
They’re about gentrification in D.C., where he’s from, they’re about characters from Toni Morrison’s Beloved-they’re about lots of things, and the book as a whole has such a lot of sweetness to it, even though some of its subjects are heavy. It happened that the poet was there at the booth that day, and he kindly signed my book and told me a bit about the poems. Press, who always have any number of titles that excite me. There’s “Harry Belafonte’s ‘Jump in the Line’ (first 16 seconds)'” and “Michael Jackson’s ‘Human Nature’ (first 17 seconds)'” and “Madonna’s ‘Crazy for You’ (first 22 seconds).'” Get the picture? The poems, all of them evocative, are fun for the feeling of surprise they invoke, and each one is short and bright, sexy or triumphant or heavy-sad, depending, with wordplay as musical as the songs they commemorate.Īnother happy discovery was Wisdom Teeth by Derrick Weston Brown, published by P.M.
Each poem is “about” a song-specifically, the song’s crucial opening moments. Kearney’s book is small and pleasing to hold, about the size and shape of a CD. I didn’t know they published books and was tickled to see the wide range of sizes and styles on their table, which editor Eric Lorberer, who was there that day, told me was their goal: To make the appearance of each small volume representative of the poet’s work. One of the books is called Starts Spinning by Douglas Kearney, put out by Rain Taxi, the literary book review journal. I was lucky to find three fine books of poetry, and it happens that two of them are quite musical-mixtapes of a kind, as the writer Simone Jacobson would have it. There sure were a lot of beautiful people with beautiful books. We were busy at the booth all day, so I only got out from behind my own table to check out the others briefly. I have things I want to share and say and do. Standing in the middle of the swirl of activity, talking to people about my work and theirs, I was reminded that-yes, I am a person in the world. I spent Saturday at the Microcosm Publishing booth talking to people and signing copies of my new book, The Kitchen Witch, which was a lovely and energizing experience, in large part because I haven’t done anything like this in … oh, just over two years now. Last weekend I attended AWP, the huge publishing conference that happened to be held here in Philadelphia this year.
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