I Remember Death by its Proximity to What I Love 

Mahogany L. Browne’s I Remember Death by Its Proximity to What I Love reads as a single, continuous poem (though it is divided into parts) that explores the inheritance of grief, the violence of racism and incarceration, and the transportive potential of writing. I read this book as a kind of deconstructed ars poetica, in which the poet, particularly in times of strife or overwhelming intensity, finds a poem “waiting to be picked up / dusted off.” Here, art programs are used “to settle the inmates” and corrective facilities are surprised to find “why humans climb the walls” after the teacher (presumably Browne) “is asked to stop / bringing poems / that encourage / Collective behavior.” Browne makes an argument for what poems can do: liberate spirits, displace rage, or “shape the aftermath of a mudslide / into something compact.” Browne opens the remarkable “Of COVID-19: An introspection on LOCKDOWN,” with “San Quentin ain’t got a skyline to dream about” and later writes, “they call us ungovernable.” On the third page of the poem, one line stands alone in blankness: “There ain’t no poem in that.” 

On the last page of the poem and the book, a single couplet: “send a kite to Folsom / as we correct our form.” I am struck by the brilliance of these last two lines and what the meticulous choice of words suggests about the prison industrial complex. To begin at the end, Browne’s attention to the word “form” makes it clear that for this poet, what we can and cannot do, can and cannot heal, is a formal argument, and that we must entirely reset the constraints for how we live. “Correct” feels like a critique of the term “correctional facility” itself. “We” as a way to make us all complicit. And the word “as” to mark two coinciding temporalities and suggest that grace can be offered even while in the process of re-imagining form. And of course, where there is no skyline, still, a “kite” rises into view.