English Lit 

Bernard Clay’s English Lit explores what we foreground. In “Born Trekker,” Clay describes being a Black person out in nature, where white people stare at him as if he’s spoiling their recreation. Instead of the “conifer forest” or “elk prairie,” the speaker becomes the center of the wilderness that whiteness wants to “school.” Similarly, in the poem “The (Un)Seen,” the speaker is the only Black person in an art gallery, staring at the lone photo where someone looks like him:

Here, like those men
I am both obvious
and overlooked
framed so far in the foreground 
that I am background 

This cinematic blurring and sharpening draws our attention to a whole social eco-system (an art gallery, a bus ride, a living room, a hiking trail, a street from childhood), while also demonstrating what Clay does best, which is to never make entirely clear who is the protagonist of these storied poems. In the remarkable “Learning to Cuss,” Clay writes of his “ghoulish” childhood best friend named “man” who strangles animals and hits girls. Clay suggests that the friendship was inevitable:

but see            back then best friends
were like daddies
you’re stuck with forever

The reader is focused on the relationship between “man” and the speaker until the closing stanza, when Clay reveals that he was beaten by his actual father and not “man.” In this moment, the simile “best friends were like daddies” comes to fruition. Clay sets things up by foreshadowing what appears at first to be “background” detail, but ends up being crucial to the poem. 

Reading this book had me thinking about what similaic and metaphorical work can do: provide parallels, endlessly defer, muddy and clarify images and associations. But in a book that centers race and otherness, what might Clay be trying to argue about the limitations or potential of similitude? Furthermore, what does it mean when the thing we ignore (the “obvious and overlooked”) turns out to be the most semantically rich part of a poem?