Bluest Nude
Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe is a heady mix of ekphrastic and archival poems that draws on work by Betye Saar and Malick Sidibé, alongside interviews with Mickalene Thomas and Carrie Mae Weems. As Codjoe conjures the unmistakable textures of Black Americana, Bluest Nude also examines the rift between memory and image, focusing in particular on photography:
When I want to remember
something beautiful, instead of taking
a photograph, I close my eyes.
I watched as you covered my nipple
with your mouth. Desire made you
beautiful. I closed my eyes.
“Posing Nude,” a response to Deana Lawson’s Living Room, Brownsville, Brooklyn, posits that a “photograph tells truths / and lies.” Elsewhere, a speaker asserts, “I don’t like being photographed” and then, as if by way of explanation, quotes Susan Sontag, who writes, in “On Photography,” that a “photograph / passes for proof [… ] that a given thing / has happened.”
Bluest Nude is densely packed with striking descriptions (“I will clean ash / from the Madonna’s cheek using the wet / rag of my tongue”), and ever-shifting images (“I will become / a pungent, earthly bulb. I’ll pillar to salt. I’ll remember / the pain of childbirth, remember being born”). In “Burying Seeds,” a speaker assesses various dreamlike transformations:
Grief is the bride of every good thing, Betty Shabazz
reminds me. I’m wearing a veil the shape of a waterfall,
which is also the shape of my mother’s dress fallingfrom her shoulders. Through its fabric, I can see a cloud
turning into a horse and a plane that could be a star—
a star that might be a planet. It’s hard to tell from here,
The collection also functions as a kind of layered self-portrait. In one poem, the speaker recalls: “As I lay on the prickly grass, grasshoppers chattered / in my hair. […] When I rose, I left the print / of a woman behind,” and elsewhere the speaker claims “[m]y body is a lens / I can look through with my mind.”