Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves

“These poems and pieces of prose are a manifestation of an old spiritual my grandmother Mamatha used to sing when I was a child,” writes J. Drew Lanham in his foreword to Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves. “It was her own declaration of life, liberty, and a pursuit of happiness otherwise denied by an American society rife with racism, misogyny, and all manner of injustices,” he explains.

Many of the poems included in this collection address racism and discrimination, as well as environmental concerns, expressing anger and sorrow in the face of injustice. At the same time, there are moments of joy and gratitude in poems that engage “wildness” as a source of joy, inviting readers to listen to their bodies, their fellow humans and other living creatures, and to what is happening in the world around them.

Joy is the thriving
a people who won’t die
in the midst of all this
dying;
the breaths,
ins followed by outs,
easy—
without begging for air
or asking your mama’s ghost
to help.

Here, the speaker is alluding to the killing of George Floyd, while imagining an alternate reality, one that is free from the threat of racial violence.

Lanham’s love for birds is evident throughout this collection, and they appear often, sometimes in unexpected ways. In “Nine New Revelations for the Black Bird Watcher,” the author draws on images of birds to examine biases against immigrants and people of color:

Hooded warblers are lucky. They can wear hoodies and no one
asks questions or feels threatened. Vigilante ‘Mericans don’t
mobilize to make citizens arrests if they loiter in a strange shrub
for too long.

Each revelation explores a different form of discrimination; in the final one, Lanham asserts: “Birds don’t mind if we misidentify them, ‘cause they know who they are without our labels.” The poem concludes by pointing to the “catalog of stupid things humans do to make their already difficult lives harder”—among them “disrespect of habitat” and “pollution”—while emphasizing the interconnectedness of our world.