Perfect Black

The narrative poems in Perfect Black by Crystal Wilkinson invoke a world with the imagistic and geographic precision of Jean Toomer’s Cane; the witty invitation of Lucille Clifton; and the rolling panoramas of Black life explored in the work of Gwendolyn Brooks. In “The Water Witch on Reading,” the speaker begins with dramatic ease: “Oh I cipher pretty good & can’t no white man cheat me.” The Water Witch can read a man’s eye and “level a girder by sight” and can interpret almost any interaction or gesture except for those that involve words. In “The Water Witch on Salvation,” the witch rescues a kidnapped grand-baby who doesn’t even realize the danger they were in, and wonders “if any living thing could ever be tamed.” What is the witch telling us about the limits of one’s own magic and mythology? If the wild child spirit cannot be tamed and the language of others cannot be interpreted, what can we really know about the threats that surround us? When Wilkinson grasps at the limitations of what we can control or know, she is deeply funny and cutting. In “The Water Witch on Invasion” she writes: 

                                                            Sometimes
i turn the light on, so i can see who their daddies are.
Young white boys are like that sometimes, smelling
their selves, thinking they can do it cause i'm black,
cause i'm old, or just cause. Cause i’m a servant of the good
 Lord
is the reason i ain’t never shot one yet. …

One of Wilkinson’s poetic moves is transfiguring her beloveds into other entities. Her grandmother becomes a harbor, a lifeboat. Her father—a city. Prince, a respite. Beyond the symbolic value of these transfigurations, there may be an argument about Black ontology and perfection. In “Black & Fat & Perfect,” Wilkinson notes the silence, stillness, balance, and patience of Black love. There is moonlight outside and light dancing at the window, but inside the house, interiority is figured as a Black buoyancy that holds another in “capable, warm hands.”