Negative Money

“In white directions // America is expensive,” notes the opening poem in Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s Negative Money. The collection details debts and prices in a white supremacist country, whether in academia, sex, or housing; when the Black speaker “bought / a condo from a Confederate soldier / re-enactor,” they also “bought / candor.” In “Story from a White Barbershop,” the white barber thinks “he knows a thing or two / about a thing or two about slavery” and “how it’s worked to our advantage: that owners mated / the strongest with the fastest & today we can outrun // & catch the world one-handed.” The speaker responds in financial terms:

I know the logic of camouflage and want
the good thing to stay the good thing even when it can’t.
I tip well anyway, let him think generosity is in my bones.

Several poems are described as collaborations with versions of the Forever Gwen Brooks and the Talk to Transformer generators, technologies that refuse and transform the input, but also repeat and claim it: “That’s how it goes with these puzzles.” The poem “They were armed with long guns” takes its title from a news headline and lists places where “I fear for my life,” like parties, tunnels, and school, school, school. Using the Internet Anagram Server, Bertram variously anagrams the title into disturbing reminders like “Entry to elsewhere. Where / were you last night?” and “Right on, angel. This earth / somehow leaner.” Since the poem’s writing, hundreds more mass shootings have taken place where “they were armed with long guns.”

Existing language and tools, in all their rearrangements, do not change structures, provide justice, or give meaning: “I want to know who wrote the code / that runs me, the code I punch down my gut.” Poems titled “Colonizer Money,” “Lust Money,” and “Anthropocene Money” submit that money is indivisible from these systems, including for the men who have charged, owed, and spent it in “My Past Has Value”: “They paid for rent, / spent hundreds on this girl’s birthday steaks. / […] Of what did I / remind them?” Across poetic forms and narrative designs, Negative Money meticulously defies ownership and resolution.