If your encounter with these poems is anything like mine, the first thing you might experience is pure music: the thick stunning spellbinding sound at work in Safiya Sinclair’s writing. And then almost at the same time you might realize that the poems, which are often layerings of elaborations, lists, and collations, are also telling stories, making arguments even, and conjuring images with a moving deftness and visceral potency. Listen to the brilliant patterning of vowels—the “ahs” of “father” and the “un” of “unbending” and “unbroken” turning into the “oh” of “low” in “Pocomania,” named for a religion in Sinclair’s native Jamaica:
Father unbending father unbroken father
with the low-hanging belly, father I was cleaved from,
pressed into, cast and remolded, father I was forged
in the fire of your self. Ripped my veined skin, one eyelid,
father my black tangle of hair and teeth. Born yellowed
and wrinkled, father your jackfruit, foster my overripe flesh.
Father your first daughter now severed at the ankles, father
your black machete …
