Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

To Inter Your Name in Earth: a Review of Kevin Young’s Brown

By Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Kevin T. O’Connor

Brown: Poems
by Kevin Young
Knopf, 176pp., $19.29
Harvard Review

In The Book of Hours, his 2011 collection, Kevin Young moved from elegiac responses to the sudden death of his father to reanimating poems on the birth of his son. His new collection, Brown, reverses the trajectory, beginning with “Home Recordings,” shadowed recollections of boyhood, and culminating with “Field Recordings,” somber reflections on the recurring traumas of African American social history. In its progression toward a more experienced vision, this brilliant and moving collection is structured as a coming-of-age chronicle. Young’s poetry on social issues tempers a tragic sense of outrage with a blues-based ethos which, as Young points out in a recent review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power, is “embodied by the likes of the poet Lucille Clifton or Zora Neale Hurston … [and] sees black life as a secret pleasure, or at least sees joy, however hard-earned, as ‘an act of resistance.’” In these poems, the expression of “hard-earned joy” in the face of unspeakable injustice is an ennobling challenge. [Read more…]

Bloom how you must, wild: a Review of Dispatch, by Cameron Awkward-Rich

By Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Flora Field

Dispatch
by Cameron Awkward-Rich
Persea, 80pp., $12.69
Columbia Journal

In poetry, a body becomes not just a vehicle through which we move about the world, but the lens from which we write that experience. What does it then mean to comment on the world from a body that exists at the intersection of so many systems of violence? How does that violence surround and move through the body? What does one do to try and move away from it, while not moving away from their communities? [Read more…]

Banishment

By 4 Comments

for Sharon Doubiago

She urinates on the graves
of her precursors—
it’s her thing (one of many),
to “unite my living waters
with theirs.” The list
includes Camus,
Karl Marx, George Eliot,
over a hundred in all.
She once called me a fascist. [Read more…]

The Slave Trade

By Leave a Comment

by Iman Mersal 
translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell
.
            I went down the narrow passage, wide enough for one slave at a time, to the harbor.
            An Englishman inspects the line of those leaving the fort—maybe he has unloaded his cargo of missionaries and guns and now waits for a ship to carry him over the ocean to the cane fields. A handsome man, in fact. Why is he smiling at me?
            Piles of gold beneath the palms, piles of salt under the sun.
            When will a sailor come unfasten the iron ball from my feet? I want to make sure the pencil and Moleskin notebook are still in my backpack, since I plan to turn whatever happens to me into heart-wrenching prose.

[Read more…]

Where to Begin?

By Leave a Comment

by Jacques J. Rancourt

First, we’re skinny-dipping,
Sam & I, in a pond in Tennessee,

which is his idea, I should say,
& the tree with the rope swing
looms darker

than the dark night sky.

Second, the harvest moon,
which we came here to see,

is nowhere to be found,
instead the sky burning with stars
I can’t see without my glasses [Read more…]

Penal Cistern Lightning Throne Lightning Rebounded

By Leave a Comment

by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Back into the body all the lightning goes
back into the body. Up through the crown
of the skull and round again like the Whip-It
at the fairgrounds. Pushing the boundaries
of the light body. Overloading the light
body. Silly bowl shaking above the bowl
of the skull, which is a bowl holding court over
bowl the brain. Bowl into bowl into bowl.
All the curves pressing together. Too much
light in the light body. Body of cattle after long [Read more…]

Pain Scale

By Leave a Comment

by Catherine Barnett

Floating above the gynecologist’s hands,
Dolor looks down at me
with her many expressions.

Someone sketched the eyes, the mouths,
someone pinned them up,
arranged the faces

so they softly say, like this? like this?
The doctor says to choose one,
but I’m no fool, I close my eyes [Read more…]

I Listen

By Leave a Comment

by John Biscello
From his forthcoming collection of poems, Arclight, publishing this February by Indie Blu(e) Publishing
.......................................
Dawn. The sea breeze,
salt-fringed, rolls in through
the opened glass doors,
its damp fingers sifting
and touching upon
the cravings,
rent and folds
of our shared bare skin,
It’s like home, you say,
and this makes me dig my nails
in deeper, [Read more...]

In The Grand Scheme Of Things

By Leave a Comment

by Maggie Smith

It sounds like someone wound up the wrens
and let them go, let them chatter across your lawn

like cheap toys, and from here an airplane
seems to fly only from one tree to another, barely

chalking a line between them. We say the naked eye
as if the eye could be clothed, as if it isn’t the world

that refuses to undress unless we turn our backs.
It shows us what it chooses, nothing more, [Read more…]

American Sonnet For My Past And Future Assassin

By Leave a Comment

by Terrance Hayes

It feels sadder when a black person says Nigga
Because it sounds like Nigger. It feels sadder
When a brother or sister says Nigga because
It sounds like Nigger. I have never heard either
Word in the mouth of my mother or father.
Once I had a lover who said neither word
Out loud. I used neither word for years.
It feels sadder to hear a nigga say Nigga when
It sounds like Nigger. Nothing saddens me more
Than nigger, one whose master has no Lord.
No word leaves me more graced by shame.
You will always be my nigga, I say to the mirror
Because it is a dark water the temperature
Of a blade, the yellow flower stalking a dream. [Read more…]

“The Curtain,” by Hayden Carruth

By Leave a Comment

From Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey: Poems, 1991-1995
(Copper Canyon Press)
Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and rearing.
We can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-renewing sump of corpse-flesh.
But in this valley the snow falls silently all day, and out our window
We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in our little house,
We see earth smoothened and beautified, made like a fantasy, the snow-clad trees
So graceful.

[Read more…]

Roque Dalton’s “Toward a Better Love”

By Leave a Comment

“Sex is a political condition.” — Kate Millet

No one disputes that sex
is a condition in the world of the couple:
from there, tenderness and its wild branches.

No one disputes that sex
is a domestic condition:
from there, kids,
nights in common
and days divided
(he, looking for bread in the street,
in offices or factories;
she, in the rear guard of domestic functions,
in the strategy and tactic of the kitchen
that allows survival in a common struggle
at least to the end of the month). [Read more…]

a cop-out to a possible immortality

By 1 Comment

From Charles Bukowski’s just released collection of rare and never-before-seen material — poems from obscure, hard-to-find magazines, as well as from libraries and private collections all over the country — Storm for the Living and the Dead.

if we can’t make literature out of our
agony

what are we going to do with 
it?

beg in the streets?

I like my minor comforts 
just like any other
son of a
bitch