Smudge by Mahogany L. Browne (review)

With her 2015 chapbook collection Smudge (Button Poetry / Exploding Pinecone Press), poet, activist, and performance poetry champion Mahogany Browne explores the cruel complexity of inter-racial discrimination, familial strain, and anxiety within the African-American community. The “you,” to whom so many of these poems are addressed, might just as well be written back to another knowing reader who, too, has been the victim of bullied insults and ever-present reminders of a socio-cultural “ideal”: light-skinned, “good” hair, perfect curves. Consider, for example, the following passage from the collection’s opening poem,

You brown dirty dark black blackest night midnight bluebl___k girl y o u

soblk

somehow you forgot your name.

The full use of “black” and “blackest” are weaponized. They become two words within a string of abusive descriptors and quick alliterative pacing that read more like fisted jabs. One feels pummeled and picked apart, reduced to abbreviated shorthand (“blk”) or in pieces, incomplete (“bl___k”) as the speaker laments her unrequited “desire to be wanted.”

Even the physical layout itself (Smudge is set in landscape, not a traditional portrait style) can be said to represent the speaker’s own sense of self, uniquely different and apart from the common shape of her contemporaries. It also provides ample room for Browne’s ranging, spatial forms to flow across the page, as in this excerpt from “When 12 Play Was on Repeat”:

When you are a deep amber & your jheri curl is a distant memory & your shape is swollen in the perfect places & the boys remember your name & your first and last crush sings to you come here with a lilt in his walk & his tongue wags you towards him with its pale pink and you smile because you remember the sun wrinkles your darkness—

Here, the page-spanning lines and foregone punctuation pull our eyes from left to right, building suspense and anxiety with each new detail. The scene comes together as memory itself, an associative collage of indelible detail and emotionality that feels absolutely present. The intimacy of the poem is further enhanced by its narrative structure, using interior monologue to reveal the speaker’s inner voice. “When 12 Play Was on Repeat” reels in the sexual anxiety of adolescence, of first loves and wanting “a story for the cold tiles when there are only bra straps & lip gloss & hair brushes and smiles,” to be more than—quoting the speaker—a “blk girl mistake.”

Browne’s poetry is a kick in the chest, immediate and natural as the spoken word. With five LPs, countless performance awards, and a longstanding role as the Friday Night Slam poetry program director at the Nuyorican Poets Café in the Lower East Side, Browne’s spoken word bona fides are stone set. And where poems written for the page make use of stanzaic structure, enjambed line breaks, and literary forms to greater effect, spoken word is ethereal by design. The audience must be made to see and feel every beat of the piece in real time. There is no room for pretense or encumbered prose to overwhelm the listener; rather, it highlights the unique emotional resonance of lyric storytelling. With Smudge, Mahogany Browne underscores the full range of her artistic power in poems that feel equally at home on the mic as they do on the page. Consider, for example, the opening stanza of this untitled poem:

Cause you ain’t seen none of them praying/whenThey crack/baby skull/open wide/on the side-Walk/call it jump in/like a black child need toKnow/how destructive a leap can be/like hisBlack skin know what “in” mean/in the firstDamn place/they say family and gang/  beThe same/so it ain’t mean nothing different/

It is impossible to ignore the aural quality of these lines, from the speaker’s vernacular to Browne’s phrasal pacing. The piece nearly reads like something found, a moment of living poetry overheard and fused with all the nuance of written verse. The repeating trochees and Browne’s...