Slowing Down to Look at Books by Kei Miller and Cyrée Jarelle Johnson

Poet and critic Joseph Fritsch considers Kei Miller's In Nearby Bushes (Carcanet, 2019) and Cyrée Jarelle Johnson's Slingshot (Nightboat, 2019) in a piece for Public Books that focuses on the different strategies poets must use—as opposed to visual artists—when investigating "the social and political dimensions of objects." An excerpt:

Throughout Miller’s book, ambivalence unsettles us. With an opening cenotaphic poem—reminiscent of the infamous list of names in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014) and the epigraph to Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987)—and a final section that graphically recounts murders perpetrated in the bushes, the collection as a whole does not try to redeem the space of the bushes. The poet does not neutralize violence by establishing an authorial distance. He writes, “I did not know you. I do not know that my breath had any right to catch, or my heart to stop, or myself to wake up these past few nights haunted by the dream of you.”

Lyrical contemplation brings to the fore the Jamaican landscape in which the collection is set and its inextricable relationship to racialized violence. This latent violence is seen in the collapsing of time: “On evenings like this, the air smelling / of what you might call molasses & I / might call slavery—it is hard to tell / what century we are in.” Here, the molasses is named with a specificity that the book’s bushes resist. Indeed, the “stretch of canefield” from which the molasses may have originated or “the crotons behind the house” can become “the nearby bushes,” in a pinch.

The poem’s cagey references to specific flora make for an interesting twist on a more conventional use of botanical nomenclature to taxonomize. One plant blends into another.…

Find it all at Public Books.