San Francisco Chronicle Reviews Three New Books

Diana Whitney at the San Francisco Chronicle reviews three new poetry collections: Evie Shockley's semiautomatic (Wesleyan University Press, 2018); James Crews's Telling My Father (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2018); and Nicole Sealey's Ordinary Beast (Ecco, 2018). "Formally agile, Sealey’s poems alternately sear and shine, revealing her keen intellect and existential vision," says the poet and essayist. More from this portion of the triple-review:

Born in St. Thomas and raised in Florida, Sealey now lives in New York and directs the Cave Canem Foundation. Her restive poems range over the globe, grounded in history and culture but luminous with emotional imagery. “What I’d like is to be white/ as the unsparing light at tunnel’s end,” she writes in “Legendary,” a sonnet sequence spoken by transgender performers in “Paris is Burning,” a documentary film about drag in 1980’s Harlem. Sealey captures the drag queens’ voices in all their pageantry and longing, reimagines them as both extraordinary and profoundly human. Her empathy unfolds in short lines and clear syntax, a spaciousness of language and thought.

Sealey’s intricate forms include a sestina, a cento and an erasure, as well as the ingenious form she invented, the obverse. In “Candelabra with Heads,” she describes with urgency a Hirschhorn installation at the Tate: “this brood of mannequins, cocooned/ and mounted on a wooden scaffold,” bringing the reader into the experience of witness. “Can you see them hanging?” she asks, then implicates us in the atrocity on display: memory of bodies burning, the shadow of America’s lynchings repeated as the poem reverses itself, replays each line backwards until the final thesis. Sealey is compelled by the act of construction, whether on the page, at an art gallery, or in Nigeria, where townspeople build a mansion out of dirt and clay, dedicated to a deity. “I want/ to learn how to make something/ holy, then walk away,” she declares — her creative mission statement and the triumph of “Ordinary Beast.” The book ends in intimacy, in bed with the beloved. In the face of injustice and suffering, she tenders the brief flame of human love.

Find the full piece at the SF Chronicle.