The Color of James Brown’s Scream
Akashic Books
Cover art by Victor Ehikhamenor
The poems, therefore, reveal not so much self-conscious sophistication, but something more valuable, a bounding pleasure in language and its possibilities. We begin with the sensuality of people engaging with the scents and fluids of our lives, and then, gradually, we begin to see the grace of a kind of honesty: ‘since I’m remembering this, or making it up/ there is only darkness’, he writes. We begin to believe this, and further, that the poem is a way to contend with this darkness.
Kwame Dawes, from the prefaceExcerpt
For the purist, hung up on tracing a drum break to its source, acquired in the few moments’ grace before the store-clerk, thin voiced, announces closing time it’s not just the drummer’s slack grip, how the hook line swings in the session singer’s interpretation, or the engineer’s too-loud approximation of the MacGyver theme tune, it’s that hiss, the room fetching itself from itself in hiccups and spools.
Kayombo Chingonyi, from “The Room”