Book Review: Black Maria
by Kevin Young
This is a noir movie in verse, in a spare, mattress-ticking-and-iron-rail style. The language is both gritty and playful. You never forget that these characters are leading lives of being a little too cold, a little too poor, a little too drunk. Even the sex scenes occur in seedy motels and the rhapsodies are about forgetting.
Rendezvous
[many awesome lines omitted, from now on represented by ....]
Her noble camisole
flees her body, wholly
And she is above me
floating, dyed
Hair caught
in stars & areoles --
Lingering cigarette light
Bolted-down seascape art
Peristent static radio
My growing, gibbous heart
The Alias
...
I drink a lot
about my thinking problem --
Nightcap,
noontime nip --
She my unquit habit.
.....
My good eye watched
all night the storm
Drown the street in worms
The Rushes
....
Planned she & I would meet
where the dead sleep, pretending
No one there knew me --
Beneathe the morgue moon,
blue light tugging at seas
One day, I thought, that
will be me
In the godawful ground --
Our kisses cemeteries
The suicides coughing in their restless deep
The moon autopsied
to find out if it waned
From natural causes.
Bulletproof hearses.
......
I snapped back to see
her hushed beside me
Soft-focus frame fading
The fedoraed darkness moving --
Our arms open
as fire, we embraced
While bullets ricocheted
off stone angels
Worn down by weather
& winnowed by tears
Of red-clad windows
in crocodile heels
Who visit just one hour a year.
Stills
....
Without her I am incomplete --
prehensible, licit, couth.
*
Wisdom this tooth
aching I want removed.
The Grift
....
His real home was six feet
beneath ground, he was just
up here renting breath
with the rest of us, short-term lease
he's fallen behind on.
*
Flimflam man,
two empty hands.
In short, I really loved this book, and was strangely unsurprised when I got to the end and there was a heartfelt thank-you to Colson Whitehead, because while the voice wasn't that similar, this book and The Intuitionist could exist in the same world.
Read if: You like lyrical poetry featuring a complete absence of ladies, lillies, clouds, or joy. If you are in the mood for a long-form poetry book. If you love noir and the trenchcoated gumshoes and fallen chantueses that populate it.
Skip if: You really want straightforward beauty, you hate short lines, poetry seems inefficient to you.
This is a noir movie in verse, in a spare, mattress-ticking-and-iron-rail style. The language is both gritty and playful. You never forget that these characters are leading lives of being a little too cold, a little too poor, a little too drunk. Even the sex scenes occur in seedy motels and the rhapsodies are about forgetting.
Rendezvous
[many awesome lines omitted, from now on represented by ....]
Her noble camisole
flees her body, wholly
And she is above me
floating, dyed
Hair caught
in stars & areoles --
Lingering cigarette light
Bolted-down seascape art
Peristent static radio
My growing, gibbous heart
The Alias
...
I drink a lot
about my thinking problem --
Nightcap,
noontime nip --
She my unquit habit.
.....
My good eye watched
all night the storm
Drown the street in worms
The Rushes
....
Planned she & I would meet
where the dead sleep, pretending
No one there knew me --
Beneathe the morgue moon,
blue light tugging at seas
One day, I thought, that
will be me
In the godawful ground --
Our kisses cemeteries
The suicides coughing in their restless deep
The moon autopsied
to find out if it waned
From natural causes.
Bulletproof hearses.
......
I snapped back to see
her hushed beside me
Soft-focus frame fading
The fedoraed darkness moving --
Our arms open
as fire, we embraced
While bullets ricocheted
off stone angels
Worn down by weather
& winnowed by tears
Of red-clad windows
in crocodile heels
Who visit just one hour a year.
Stills
....
Without her I am incomplete --
prehensible, licit, couth.
*
Wisdom this tooth
aching I want removed.
The Grift
....
His real home was six feet
beneath ground, he was just
up here renting breath
with the rest of us, short-term lease
he's fallen behind on.
*
Flimflam man,
two empty hands.
In short, I really loved this book, and was strangely unsurprised when I got to the end and there was a heartfelt thank-you to Colson Whitehead, because while the voice wasn't that similar, this book and The Intuitionist could exist in the same world.
Read if: You like lyrical poetry featuring a complete absence of ladies, lillies, clouds, or joy. If you are in the mood for a long-form poetry book. If you love noir and the trenchcoated gumshoes and fallen chantueses that populate it.
Skip if: You really want straightforward beauty, you hate short lines, poetry seems inefficient to you.