English Kills Review Recounts an Evening With Soul Sister Review

Hold on to your hats! The Soul Sister Review, a Monday Reading Series in NYC, is back, curated by Cynthia Manick. Learn more about the series in this review by Safia Jama over at English Kills Review. More:

There’s been some good buzz around the reading series Soul Sister Revue, curated by the poet Cynthia Manick. I was eager to see how the series has taken shape since its early shows at Cornelia Street Café and the New York Poetry Festival.

I headed to Hi-Fi in the East Village on a recent Tuesday night. The back-room felt intimate in an old-school-Village kind of way, complete with red brick and a tiny stage.

A few minutes after six, just about every seat was filled. The room had the intensity of a class about to begin.

Ed Toney, a chemist by day and a poet by night, was our host for the evening. “What is soul?” asked Toney. Some audience members called out the names of beloved musicians.

“What’s soul?” Toney asked again.

“It’s what you be feeling,” said the poet Tyehimba Jess, sitting in the audience.

With that, the room warmed up, and Toney welcomed the first featured reader of the evening, E.J. Antonio. I’ve seen Antonio perform with a bassist, and her poetry is rich with jazz-infused music. She began with “Latch Key,” a poem with stark, crisp lines: “For safety, lock the doors.” The poem weaves between childhood and the adult speaker’s present predicament: “Admire how lonely has become a deep crease in your forehead.” Out of loss comes wisdom related to a daughter: “Be rain, wash it all away.”

Soul is serious business, and the evening moved briskly from poet to poet, no breaks. Up next was Jeremy Clark, who recently moved to Newark from his home state of Kentucky to attend the M.F.A program at Rutgers. Clark read poems of delicate hurt about that richest of topics, childhood: “Let the broken light bulb tell it.” The young speaker escapes into his imagination, plastering a Jimi Hendrix poster over a hole in the wall: “I push my chair against the wall and the broom becomes a microphone.” [...]

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