Nick Sturm's Triple Review at the Georgia Review

In case you missed it, Nick Sturm penned an essay about work by Simone White, Stacy Szymaszek, and Edmund Berrigan, who "can be read together as a contemporary micro-lineage associated with the aesthetic and institutional legacies of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery." More, from the Georgia Review:

[Attention] to pleasure’s complexity is at the center of the [White's Dear Angel of Death]. White is quick, brilliant, and uncompromising. Sometimes in the form of a corrective voice of understatement and wit, as in “Two Things Were Happening at Once,” in which she writes, “sometimes I am like / your assessment of this thing’s causation is faulty,” or it takes on a sonic pleasure, as in the incredible “Stingray”: “her haunch whip a think acquired as a gorgeous capital.” These lines as soundscapes produce entire environments in which a reader can think, feel, and move. “This is the hour,” she writes, “for thinking hydrangea. Let no man look at me.” A luscious freedom is declared again and again.

These poems explore what happens when one’s autonomy—as a black woman, as a mother, as a lover, as a writer—is constantly compromised. “[W]hat if / my own being / broken / is the new law,” White asks in “We Are Here to Slow Time,” an unresolved potentiality that carries over into the analysis in “Dear Angel of Death” of trap music’s construction of “narcotized” personhood, as well as the potentialities and failures embedded in the music’s schematics for living and feeling differently. White’s line from “Stingray,” “raucous to suspend life outside of life,” gestures toward the simultaneous distance and desire in trap, this black music that, she suggests, is not the same black music writers like Nathaniel Mackey or Fred Moten mean when they discuss Black Music. And White is asking—why not? “Dear Angel of Death” interrogates a history of aesthetic thinking via citation that constructs Black Music as the ground for aesthetic theory. White is suspicious of the critical discourses that have made Black Music synonymous with black poetics when Black Music only seems to mean the blues or jazz. After all, as she writes, “jazz is dead,” with no updated sensibility that accounts, for instance, for R&B and hip hop. Her thinking through the construction of Black Music as a foundation for black poetics, and her asking for alternatives to antiquated definitions of Black Music, is a radical critique of citationality and lineage as givens of intellectual inheritance. Rather, lineage for White is a flexible substance...

Read the full essay at the Georgia Review.