12 Formally Innovative Books by Contemporary Poets of Color
For Poetry Month, we pulled one of our resident poetry-lover Serena’s posts on formally exciting poetry from the archives.
Contemporary formalism in poetry is, and has been, thriving, thanks to the contributions of writers of color. This seems to confuse, even infuriate, ill-read critics who would like for poetry, and the standard by which we measure it, to remain confined by their racial imaginary. Which is to say, it sucks to see identity-based, experiential poetics garner wide acclaim and popularity because:
They think being challenging is more important than being accessible and that being accessible somehow equates to a lack of complexity. They fail to engage with what is challenging and complex in ID-poetics and, in doing so, fail to honor POC for their craftsmanship (neglecting the technical lengths they go through to write in a language intended to repress and corral them).
They cannot confront the reality of us without confronting the reality of what they’ve done to us. It is easier to ignore the experience altogether than to be implicated into it.
They think writing about their predatory love and the time they got existential vibes in a garden has nothing to do with their identities when in fact it has everything to do with them.
They don’t like when people write outside of and/or in spite of and/or in complete disregard of the white gaze, not at all concerned with whether or not they relate to it. They presume the scenarios in #3 qualify as a more “universal” experience. Lol. Hunny.
To avoid reconciling with these truths, critics often group together widely different poets writing from widely different experiences, pigeonhole them, and dismiss them. They see the canon being burned down and re-erected with more style, and choose to ignore it altogether, instead claiming that poetry is dead. Poetry is dead and form is dead! It’s a weird hill to die on…but fortunately for these critics, I have developed, for them, a beginner’s reading list highlighting 12 poets who, in recent years alone, have made indelible contributions to poetic form: lyrically, dramatically, narratively, satirically, and otherwise. This list features collections which demonstrate inventive, subversive, and/or expansive use of poetic forms, to borrow from this Chen Chen tweet. These collections feature exemplary, modern examples of sonnets, odes, ballads, ghazals, centos, and countless nonce forms, among others.
written by Serena Morales
The Tradition by Jericho Brown
For many responding to false accusations regarding contemporary poetry’s formlessness and general lack of intricacy, Jericho Brown is one of the first poets to come to mind as a line of defense.
In his latest release, The Tradition — an equally tender and trenchant collection of “mystical pastorals” centered around Brown’s fatherhood, blackness, queerness, and legacy — he features an invented form called the duplex. A duplex is a poem of seven couplets, each line consisting of nine to eleven syllables, that merges the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues. Read Brown talk about his invention in this Rumpus interview or this Bennington Review interview.
Soft Science by Franny Choi
Choi’s latest collection explores the ways we — as in the othered-we — utilize language in efforts to convince them — as in the mainstream, heteropatriarchal-them — of our humanity and our consciousness. Inspired by Turing Tests, which computer scientist Alan Turing invented as a way to measure a machine’s ability to imitate human speech, these poems offer a characteristically fierce, playful, and sensual exploration of Choi’s queer, Asian-American femininity. Filled with technology and tenderness, this aptly titled collection demonstrates just one of the ways that contemporary poets of color are inventing forms to articulate an experience which, while focalized through their identity, speaks to a collective.
American Sonnets For My Past & Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes
Hayes’s American Sonnets has heralded an eruption of sonnet-experimentation in the contemporary poetry world. The collection features seventy, searing poems of the same title, all written during the first two hundred days of the Yuck presidency. Following in his legacy, many have turned to the form, or revisited it, as a reclamatory medium for investigating modern American social issues surrounding race, gender, sexuality, and so forth.
Hayes, notably, is also the inventor of Golden Shovel, a poetic form first featured in his book Lighthead. The Golden Shovel is a poem devised in celebration of Gwendolyn Brooks, which borrows words from a line (or lines) of someone else’s poem (or song) and uses them as the last word of each line in a new poem. It is, by nature, a tribute poem, much like a cento.
Invasive Species by Marwa Helal
First featured as my 2019 Most Anticipated, and then later, as my March Staff Pick, I include it here now, for the same reason I salivated at its aroma trails — because it’s like the snack you eat when your health bar is low in a video game (the bar is low because of xenophobia, colonialism, and capitalism and the snack is solidarity).
This debut collection, much like Helal herself, resists the confines of one, even two, checkboxes. Central to the work is an extended abecedarian dotted with footnotes and citations, in which Helal merges many forms and syntaxes to tell a migration narrative focalized through her and her family’s experience with discriminatory immigration officials. Its opening poem, “poem to be read from left to right” (find it online here) takes a form invented by the poet called the Arabic, “a form that includes an Arabic letter with an Arabic footnote, and an Arabic numeral, preferably written right to left as the Arabic language is, and vehemently rejects you if you try to read it left to right.”
Olio by Tyehimba Jess
There is nothing I can say about this collection that other writers have not said better (see: Hanif Abdurraqib’s Rumpus review). Let me just say, this work, the fact that it exists, answers to the close-minded critics, abovementioned, with a resounding LMAO *eye roll emoji*. For those still in denial of contemporary inventiveness, do you even Olio, bro???
On a serious note, this highly-acclaimed, Pulitzer-winning book is an archival medley that seeks to preserve the stories of unrecorded black performers before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Rigorous, historic, and visionary — this collection offers a perfect study in inventive and contemporary uses of persona poems, odes, sonnets, contrapuntals, as well as both lyrical and narrative poetry.
Whereas by Layli Long Soldier
In Whereas, poetic innovation pushes back against political duplicity as Solider, a young Oglala Lakota poet, interrogates both what language has done, and perhaps more importantly, what language can do for a nation. This ambitious debut collection — which has been widely lauded for both its linguistic and structural genuity — holds a mirror to the bureaucratic jargon weaponized by the US government against native peoples, fragments it with fierce mastication, and spits it back out. “Employing discrete lyric, conceptual, and concrete forms; extended sequences; and sprawling prose series,” (Publishers Weekly) Solider is at once a historian, a poet, and a dual-citizen baring her teeth and her truth in the same masterful proclamation.
Look by Solmaz Sharif
Similar to Soldier and Helal, Sharif borrows from the lexicon of the U.S. government to expose their violent and discriminatory history as a warmongering, imperialist power. Through poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif articulates a moving narrative of loss and displacement.
”Solmaz Sharif mined the U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. “It matters what you call a thing,” she begins. In these virtuosic poems, she reclaims words and phrases seized and sterilized by the military, building with them a polyphonic collection that looks at the ongoing costs of war and at her own family’s fragmented narratives. The book crackles with brilliance, personal and political and literary and human.” (Hannah, bookseller at Books Are Magic)
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
Citizen is the book with which many of the others on this list are in tradition. Rankine has effectively created a new genre and, with it, a lineage. The American Lyric, which was first introduced in her debut collection, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, merges poetry, essay, and image. Critical, biographical, and lyrical…Citizen is the book that raised the bar for all of us.
Blue Fasa by Nathanial Mackey
Blue Fasa is the most recent extension of Mackey’s super epic, decades-spanning, serial poem-project weaving “Song of the Andoumboulou” and “Mu.” In it, these two poems combine to create one long song that is both “one and more than one,” and which first appeared in his National Book Award-winning collection Splay Anthem (2006), carrying through his book Nod House (2011). Though, arguably, it began long before that as Mackey follows in tradition of West African griots, though his influences (and literary references) are many. This book, like all his others, is steeped in ritual, mythic musicality, and experimentation.
Mackey is a giant and his opus is on, if not above, par with that of Olson, Whitman, and Pound.
Ordinary Beast by Nicole Sealey
“In this brilliant debut, clarity is ushered through form, strutting its way into life, into our lives.” — Claudia Rankine
Nicole Sealey — known hero of the poetry world — approaches form with immense deliberation, skill, and poise. Discover here, a cento to end all centos, an erasure, stunning sonnets, and a form invented by the poet, called the obverse. The obverse is a form similar to a palindrome poem, which repeats the first half of the poem in the second half, though Sealey modifies this by ending with a probing, thesis question rather than the opening line.
With this impressive debut, Sealey has secured herself in the hall-of-fame of poetry, and as Cortney Lamar Charleston recently, and aptly, remarked at a National Poetry Month reading that we hosted with the Rumpus, “if she is not already one of your favorite poets, she is one of your favorite poets’ favorite poets.”
Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis
This triptych, debut collection explores the ways that black women have been represented — and through these representations, reduced, objectified — in Western art over time. Experimental, ekphrastic, and autobiographical, Voyage from the Sable Venus takes its title from the long-poem sequence at the heart of the book, whose name is derived from an image by British painter Thomas Stothard. Bookended by two lyric poems, the central project is comprised entirely of artwork titles, in what the poet calls a narrative poem, though, in Adam Fitzgerald’s words, “one could also call it a feminist/queer epic, a conceptual tour de force, a revolutionary re-naming, hallucinated index, resurrected archive.”
Hum by Jamaal May
Hum? More like YUM! Excuse my enthusiasm, but Jamaal May is just, simply, a genius. It’s a gift to hear him speak, whether through the page or in person (or online). While not his most recent collection, Hum is noted for being especially inventive with regards to form (though, of course, his vision extends far beyond this debut). In it, he navigates a post-industrial landscape as well as an interior life rife with the anxieties and phobias that are central to his existence as a Detroit native, using a poetic structure meant to mimic both external and internal experiences. Featuring several remarkable sestinas and other inventions, Hum is an artful, gritty, and deeply sonorous meditation on mortality, machinery, trauma and legacy.
**This is by no means a comprehensive list and, in fact, it was incredibly difficult to abbreviate it due to the fact that writers of color have been coming out with imaginative, transformative, and inventive works for years, nay, centuries! For this reason, I chose to limit my scope (with the exception of May’s book) to collections released within the last few years. It should also be noted that these specific titles speak to a distinctly American experience, as is my primary purview, though one that is marked by colonialist/imperialist violence, and associated diasporas and migrations.
I’ve witnessed, in the literary community around me, how these writers continue to inspire the next generation of poets to confront form with intention, courage, and rich possibility. In my higher-ed experience, I often encountered the accusation(/assumption) that young, or beginning writers are neglectful of form due to an overall dismissive disposition towards the classics. I think what is actually being perceived is a dismissal of power; specifically, the type of power that exists in negation of an ‘other’ and that others’ own power, self-determination, and/or self-liberation. If this power in poetry is what makes it strong, sophisticated, makes it worthy of acclaim, then keep it! If poetry disinterested in this type of power is self-obsessed, is “the selfie of the poetry world” well good, to that I say, excuse me, sweetie, you’re blocking my light!
