I'd Watch a Movie Written by Tiana Clark

Blurbs on the backs of books can be misleading. Our expectations rise when we see that Kaveh Akbar, who has been awarded the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and keeps our Twitter feeds gloriously overflowing with amazing poetry links, says the book is "one of the best first books of poetry" and NAACP Image Award nominee Allison Joseph calls on us to "Read it, and be changed and redeemed." Can a book possibly live up to all this praise? Yes, absolutely, yes.

Tiana Clark's first full-length collection, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize winning I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, presents readers with a commanding cinematic lyricism that envelopes them in the history of American race relations and the narrator's personal history. In the poem "800 Days: Libation," Tiana Clark says, "I don't want to watch another black man die/today or know the story of how," in explanation of why she doesn't want to watch Time: The Kalief Browder Story about a sixteen-year-old awaiting trial at Rikers Island who spent two years in solitary confinement. My reaction to the poem is similar to my reaction when viewing a silhouette by visual artist Kara Walker. The works are a mixture of beauty and horror, which is to say, truth. The poem is potently self-aware about how these intersections in art are sometimes problematic, yet often necessary. It covers some of the same ground as Roxane Gay's meditation on happy endings found in "The Smooth Surface of Idylls," but sets the ideas to music, lineates them with skill and precision. "800 Days: Libation" reminds us that there are things poetry can do that other formats can't. As Yeats has said, "we make out of the quarrels with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrels with ourselves, poetry." The collection invites us into Clark's inner journey with prosody, allusions, and images.

On the journey, she often puts herself in conversation with African American women of the past. In the epistolary poem series "Conversations with Phillis Wheatley," she imagines responses to Wheat-ley, the first published African American woman poet, from her friend Obour Tanner, while also pulling in the overarching narrative of the collection. In "The Rime of Nina Simone," she uses the voice of the singer/songwriter/activist to interrogate herself about her relationship to her own art and the powers that be of the literary world.

              I wanted              to play Bach              and Beethoven              for endless encores. But

        they wouldn't let me        and they won't let you.

Things have changed Miss Simone.I have a scholarship. They want me here.

They want my poems. They want—

              Do they want you,              she says, sucking              her ghost teeth,              or your black pain?

This excerpt is fairly representative of the collection. The personal is political and vice versa. Lyrical and disjointed, but not hard to follow if you pay attention. In "The Rime of Nina Simone," the voices weave back and forth between the primary narrator of the collection and Nina Simone. Nothing is labeled or in quotation marks. The "I" can be either Clark or Simone. But, at least to me, it's always clear who is speaking even without the overt markers we get from prose or more traditional narrative poems. "Self Portrait as Hannah Peace" weaves between lines from Toni Morrison's Sula and Clark's own description of her mother on the dance floor at a country bar called the Cotton Eyed Joe in Knoxville, Tennessee. But isn't it all Clark's description? Though Morrison wrote some of the lines, Clark selects them, adapts them, helps us see another layer to their power. All of the poems in the collection using this (or similar techniques) reify the slipperiness of authorship and palimpsestic nature of identity. Her explorations of her biracial heritage, in poems such as "Mixed Bitch" and "After Agon," also reinforce these notions. All the...