Title: The Malevolent Volume
Author: Justin Phillip Reed
Themes: Self-Identity, Queerness, Violence, Racism, Protest, Horror, Mythology, Blackness, Patriotism, Loneliness
Three Words to Describe the Poems: Dense, Wordy, Phantasmal
Blurb from Back of Book: ‘Subverting celebrated classics of poetry and mythology and examining horrors from contemporary film and cultural fact, National Book Award winner Justin Phillip Reed engages darkness as an aesthetic to conjure the revenant animus that lurks beneath the exploited civilities of marginalized people. In these poems, Reed finds agency in the other-than-human identities assigned to those assaulted by savageries of the state. In doing so, he summons a retaliatory, counterviolent Black spirit to revolt and to inhabit the revolting.’
Summary and Comments: I came into this collection expecting something that was going to blow me away. Reed’s last collection, Indecency, won the 2018 National Book Award for Poetry, and any author who wins that award will always get my eyes on his/her/their work. Saying that, I have never read Indecency, so I came into this blind to Reed’s style. But, I mean, look at that blurb! It has everything I’m interested in—explorations of horror cinema, lines that drip with darkness and animus, and pieces that explore marginalized people and give them a voice. How could it go wrong?
Well, for me, it did, and it was disappointing, because I really wanted to like this collection. The poems themselves are structured well enough at first glance—Reed plays with meter throughout, and he situates the lines and stanzas in each poem to be visually appealing. He also has created a new device that he employs in some poems in the collection, which he has named CASH (consonantal anagrammatic slant homeoteleuton), in which ‘each line, or each alternating line, ends in a word or phrase composed of the same set of recycled consonant sounds, with the purpose of insinuating a sonic motif or mood.’ (Confused? Me too.)
And that’s my problem with this collection—I think it’s too smart for me. I confess to being a more casual reader of poetry, even though I had to study it at the university level and have a degree in English and creative writing. I don’t know the various ins and outs of poetry down to a T or know all the fancy little doodads that poets can use to spice up their poems, and I admit that readily. I like to read poetry that I can understand without having to spend ten minutes trying to understand what a device is in order to decipher a poem, and that means this book isn’t for me. The poems themselves, to my eye and ear at least, get bogged down in lines that are incredibly wordy and try to paint pictures that just aren’t there. The subjects are amazing, and the message behind them are great, but the lines themselves, and how heavy they feel with the dense language and attempted imagery used throughout, just had me feeling like I was trudging through mud trying to get through the whole collection. I would still highly recommend this to anyone who wants to try it, as the subjects of the poems and the themes Reed explores are quite interesting. They just aren’t something that caught my eyes, my ears, or my version of a poetry brain.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
Where to Find It: Library Catalog, Amazon, Boswell Books
Favorite Poem: ‘This Is Really Happening’
Such an odd cloud overcame the nation at that time. A damp breeze and, where a storm should be, defiance. In it, the litter of scorched marigolds fidgeted on the ground against my feet. My fists still pinched their stems as I metronomed now toward “My life in poems” and then “I want to live,” tore “my accountability to a community” from “I can’t bear to be among,” turned from “violence is a resort” to “the careful pursuit of beauty” and back. At each extreme, the pieces I ripped apart from the blossoms fell, either way, all to the ground. I brooded like this often as a child. In one summer, another cousin plucked me from a mood, unfolded and draped my back across an anthill. I was briefly a glimmer struck burning in a gust, a wild-down-the-mountainside scream, but quickly, as my body slammed into place around my sobs and my sobs, like doused coals, quit, I became small and defeated and invested in the magic of palms and soft hymns. The song of my grandmother’s balm, what was it? There was only every single ant’s explicit sting in the cache of what my flesh had recollected. I expected —at that time, in that country—for the knowledge of corporal damage and how to manage it to make itself useful. People, poetry, severity: I was lonely for a tool. From where I stood beneath the new weird weather, in a hindsight, disturbed at my being older and colorful in this lately precarious matter of facts—the climate, for example, an opinion—as I watched my orange indecision twitch in the sensitivities of wind charlotting across the black soil, I felt still so miniature and humiliated by the number of creatures who could summarize themselves into inflicting harm that I too could hardly believe the world wasn’t quite the way that I remembered.
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