My minor trickle loosing its way through town,all roofs red, redder in the stalled December summer,beckoning as if people, wind-battered bricks were an afterthought,corrects itself while losing itself on a map-less amble,yet ever cool are the seawalls and long their sweepunder a hopeful sign just over there, billboard for beerleering its restless leer among rolling acres of yellow flowerspointing to the near impossibility of continuity, as mud minaretsbristling with sticks reduce the surrounding huts to general landscapebedecking any season. Soon a man started shoutingfrom his boat. His hair matted with thought and the red perfumeof forces on horseback, rifles sheathed in saddlesas one flame-wreathed town burns into another.Soon a faraway man on a fortress wall, holdinga stick with cloth bag tied to its end poking the large treefor fruit, while the datum curls ever closer, higherunfurling away. One story has the man runningthrough deserts to another manand so on until the last runs five days unceasing, dyingwith news in his throat. Well, sure, a messenger’s task is uneasybut not for the obvious reasons, a wandering shorelinecontinually imagined as its previous iteration though the orchardof miniature berry trees blooms on schedule.The trees seem to fade more each year. The rednessleft on the ground believes itself a perfected plan, and why not,“To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies.”
“Not a Violation of the Laws of Nature but a Rare Occurrence.”
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- June 19, 2024
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“”Not a Violation of the Laws of Nature but a Rare Occurrence.”” from All Black Everything by Shane Book.
Published by University of Iowa Press in Fall 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Shane Book.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Iowa City, Iowa
University of Iowa
“All Black Everything proposes an expansive, global poetics, which is equally a poetics of Black diasporan fluency. All Black’s poems ride the crosscurrents of history and popular culture through African America, the Caribbean, West Africa, the United Kingdom, and Canada. As references whirl and constellate, All Black’s language grows dense and intricate. It gathers color and image. It acquires regional inflections, absorbs a riches of sound, and riffs on proverbial wisdom. The global reach of these poems works to collect and synthesize fragments of culture. Connections are established across time and distance. This synthesis happens as we read, and the rhythms of Black language and music become its measure.”—Kaie Kellough, author, Magnetic Equator
“Every rewind rewounds as Book’s book bars out (like breaks free). Reader, peep game— where game is play, prey, and how they stay laid down in an unsound system of robber-baron domination, post-Maria neglected Puerto Rico, (in)appropriation, and grief on grief on grief. Ergo: ‘Very hardcore business, man.’ All Black Everything left me syntaxed, thus spun as black wax under a needle; the poet on some Tender Buttons, but the buttons are on MPCs or 808s. Get it, get it. It’s ‘so good, God,’ Book leaves black ‘satchels stuffed with green.’ I pray on everything: should we meet in the lettuce aisles of ‘fully white-peopled cities,’ let us stay all Black fullness when we get there.”—Douglas Kearney, author, Sho
“Book’s poetry is sonic, sound forward, and unyielding. He wants you to know he’s Black and he’s in love with his people. This lyric is fluid; movement is necessary to his meaning. Each line plays on the one before it and flirts with the one that follows. All Black Everything should be read one poem at a time, each one chewed on, absorbed slowly on its own before continuing. . . . It is all music, it is all urgent, every poem is a declaration. Book is here. He is taking up space. And he is not compromising himself to do so.”—Little Village
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