suddenly we

“we,” reads page one of Evie Shockley’s fourth collection, suddenly we—from a distance, at least. Up close, we find 43 “you”s and one “me," all arranged into a lowercase w and e. To its very last self-correcting lines—“there is no poem unless    you/ we can find the courage to hear”—suddenly we is an inventory of ways to say “we” and mean it. Some “we”s define or distinguish: “we girls,” “our majority black election / district,” “us, the us of a.” Others are conscripted by circumstance. There’s a “we” for a nature walk, a wider “we” for jury duty, and a “we” for a nation confounded by a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic: “suddenly we were naked before / the eyes of the world.”

Shockley’s vocal range is like no other, but it needs others’ help. “At many points,” she recalls, “I only managed to find the energy to produce poems when directly asked to do so.” Cyclical expansions and contractions—outward to community, inward to the self—have always been the heartbeats oxygenating Shockley’s art. But increasingly, those cycles are poignantly arrested. Shockley dedicates suddenly we to the late Cheryl A. Wall, a field-clearing scholar of the Black literary tradition. “spin a song of respect & let it slide into a blues,” Shockley sings, praising Wall’s verdant legacy, lamenting her singular loss: “we were no ways ready to hear her time had come / but she was a natural woman, & nature took her home.”

Amid its openhearted tributes, suddenly we puts Shockley’s honed stylistic innovations on unmissable display. A lush biodiversity of forms, often in unprecedented variations—“blues-elegy for cheryl,” scatting sonnets, hyperactively rhymed ghazals. Wordplay tracking a mind at work, finding letter-precise nuances: “in the third-to-last room you visit it hung, he was hung, he was hung up, it’s a hang-up, you are hung up on this painting.” Rigid constraints—anaphora, monorhyme—trellising a climbing imagination. One early poem wraps every sentence around the wearied admission “i gave away”; a late poem enumerates “all the leave-takings.” Both encapsulate Shockley’s achievement: a boundless body of work with a skeleton of hard truths.