CANR
WORK TITLE: The Big Book of Exit Strategies
WORK NOTES: PEN Open Book Award longlist
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1982
WEBSITE: http://www.jamaalmay.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME:
http://southeastreview.org/interview-jamaal-may/ * https://sycamorereview.com/2016/04/10/jamaal-mays-the-big-book-of-exit-strategies/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1982, in Detroit, MI.
EDUCATION:Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, MFA.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Poet and educator. Instructor, Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program; co-director, Organic Weapon Arts chapbook and video series. Formerly taught poetry in public schools and worked as an audio engineer. Cave Canem resident, Rose O’Neill Literary House.
AWARDS:Beatrice Hawley Award, Notable Book Award, American Library Association, Tufts Discovery Award finalist, and NAACP Image Award nomination, all for Hum; PEN Open Book Award longlist, for The Big Book of Exit Strategies. Also received Wood Prize, Poetry magazine, Indiana Review Prize, Spirit of Detroit Award, Stadler fellowship, Kenyon Review fellowship, and Civitella Ranieri fellowship, Italy.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2014, edited by Terrance Hayes and David Lehman, Scribner Poetry (New York, NY), 2014. Contributor to periodicals and media outlets, including Believer, Ploughshares, Poetry, New Republic, and NYTimes.com. Coeditor, Solstice.
SIDELIGHTS
Award-winning poet Jamaal May both celebrates and eulogizes his native Detroit in his work. In doing so, he joins the ranks of other artists who write about the Motor City. “It really has been an exciting time for Detroit writers,” May told Sakinah Hofler in an interview appearing in the Southeast Review. “The names I can’t stop repeating are many: Vievee Francis, Matthew Olzmann, francine j. harris, Tommye Blount, Terry Blackhawk, Nandi Comer, Chace Morris, Robert Fanning, Natasha Miller—just to name a small sample of newer writers…. We also lay claim to a bevy of more established writers like Carolyn Forche, Phillip Levine, Jim Daniels, and Toi Derricotte. I can’t really say that there is a Detroit sound when it comes to poetry—if anything, what stands out is the range of voices coming from the city right now.”
May’s first collection Hum, wrote David Winter in the Journal, is “‘dedicated to the interior lives of Detroiters and the memory of David Blair,’ the book takes its formal structure from the combination of that landscape with the speaker’s anxieties, which range from the mundane to the mortal.” “Noting the empty shells of grand colonials lining the streets and battered cars sitting on cinder blocks,” stated Joelle Biele in the Boston Review, “May argues against romanticizing urban decay.” “The collection is fueled by compelling contrasts between a difficult, often ugly reality, and an aesthetic capable of finding beauty in anything,” observed Corrina Bain in Muzzle. “It is a book of contrasts between innocence and experience, and a book of place, intimately and proudly about Detroit (and how satisfying it is that Detroit be shown every inch as mythic as Blake’s London.) May is also doing one of the most urgent works of the poet, to show the fractal containment of people and their environment—what befalls the city comes into the lives of individual people.” The poet “is a storyteller,” declared Mark Eleveld in Booklist, “and his imagery is often easily decipherable. What’s more, he pays attention to sound.”
At the same time, reviewers note, May’s work is just as much about the people of Detroit as it is about the city itself. He “seems acutely aware of the injustices in our current condition,” asserted a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “but he seeks to educate rather than preach.” May excavates “the bottom of inner-city culture,” said a contributor to GC, “and reveals acts with such vibrancy that the emotions and actions can be felt through the pages. May unveils broken Detroit and the struggle for life, love and happiness with undeniable passion.” “But what makes Hum remarkable, perhaps more than its structural sophistication or thematic content, is the intimacy and authenticity May’s voice conveys as he thinks and feels his way through each line and stanza…. Ultimately, the book invests the word `hum’ with a particular sense of the human, a spiritual music that finds its way up from between May’s words and defies straightforward analysis,” Winter continued. “Formal sophistication and conceptual implication may make Hum a significant work of literature, but it is May’s human touch that fills these poems with the irreducible combination of feeling and music.”
The poet’s second collection, The Big Book of Exit Strategies, also uses imagery drawn from May’s urban home. “Like the Detroit that May describes,” wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “these poems are full of both shadow and light.” “These poems don’t make me want to sit in my chair and read them and be sad,” exclaimed Bess Cooley in the Sycamore Review. “They make me want to go to Detroit and Ferguson and everywhere in the country and do something. I want to tear down barriers and yell in the streets. May, it seems, wants to, too.” “The book … keeps one eye on the street,” Stephen Burt stated in a review on the American Academy of Poets Web site, “on the Detroit upbringing to which the poet returns.” “Whoever says poetry is dead, has not read Jamaal May’s cunning collection,” asserted a contributor to the San Diego Book Review. “Image, voice, beauty and pain is alive and well in Detroit, and so exactingly personal, it is universal.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 15, 2013, Mark Eleveld, review of Hum, p. 9.
Publishers Weekly, September 23, 2013, review of Hum, p. 55; February 15, 2016, p. review of The Big Book of Exit Strategies, p. 43.
Southeast Review, June 27, 2014, Sakinah Hofler and Anna Claire Hodge, “Interview: Jamaal May.”
Sycamore Review, April 10, 2016, Bess Cooley, “Jamaal May’s The Big Book of Exit Strategies.”
ONLINE
Academy of American Poets, https://www.poets.org/ (February 20, 2017), Stephen Burt, review of The Big Book of Exit Strategies.
Boston Review, https://bostonreview.net/ (June 26, 2014), Joelle Biele, “Microreview: Jamaal May, Hum.“
GC, http://gcmag.org/ (March 4, 2014), review of Hum.
Jamaal May Home Page, http://www.jamaalmay.com (February 20, 2017), author profile.
Journal, http://thejournalmag.org/ (September 5, 2014), David Winter, review of Hum.
Muzzle, http://www.muzzlemagazine.com/ (March 4, 2014), review of Hum.
San Diego Book Review, http://sandiegobookreview.com/ (January 9, 2017), D.M. O’Connor, review of The Big Book of Exit Strategies.*
Interview: Jamaal May
by Sakinah Hofler on June 27, 2014 in Interviews
Interview with Jamaal May
Interviewer: Anna Claire Hodge
JM BW Stool
Jamaal May was born in 1982 in Detroit, MI where he taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer. His first book, Hum (Alice James Books, 2013), received the Beatrice Hawley Award, the American Library Association’s Notable Book Award, and an NAACP Image Award nomination. Other honors include the Indiana Review Prize, the Spirit of Detroit Award, and the Stadler Fellowship. Most recently, Jamaal has been awarded a Rose O’neill Literary House Cave Canem Residency, the Kenyon Review Fellowship, and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Italy. Jamaal’s poems appear in such periodicals as The New Republic, The Believer, Poetry, Ploughshares, NYTimes.com, and Best American Poetry 2014. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers, Jamaal co-edits the poetry section of Solstice, teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program, and co-directs the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook and Video Series with Tarfia Faizullah.
Hip-hop artists are often categorized by region, and Detroit has produced both legends (Eminem, J Dilla) and newcomers making names for themselves (Danny Brown, Angel Haze, Big Sean). Who are the writers representing the Motor City and who should we be on the lookout for? Can you define the literary “sound” of Detroit?
Speaking of hip-hop, I realize I’m way more excited about Danny Brown and Angel Haze than my listening habits indicate. There’s an Angel Haze track on my “unfuckwitable” playlist that I just can’t stop replaying, and Danny Brown sounds like the truth every time I hear him. I’m embarrassed at how few tracks total I’ve heard from either of them. There just seems to be so little time to sit with the new jams lately, especially with the insane range of genres that vie for slots in the rotation. Catching another awesomely and hilariously ignorant verse from Big Sean here and there let’s me pretend like I’m still in the loop on what’s hot just before I listen to the first Portishead album for the 700 millionth time or try to play Living Colour’s “Cult of Personality” terribly on guitar. I’m that guy that calls you out of breath to ask if you heard the “new” Big Boi album that came out two years ago.
It really has been an exciting time for Detroit writers. The names I can’t stop repeating are many: Vievee Francis, Matthew Olzmann, francine j. harris, Tommye Blount, Terry Blackhawk, Nandi Comer, Chace Morris, Robert Fanning, Natasha Miller—just to name a small sample of newer writers. Many of us are dispersed around the country, doing that mercenary writer thing. We also lay claim to a bevy of more established writers like Carolyn Forche, Phillip Levine, Jim Daniels, and Toi Derricotte.
I can’t really say that there is a Detroit sound when it comes to poetry—if anything, what stands out is the range of voices coming from the city right now. Chace Morris (who is also a phenomenal hip-hip artist named Mic Write) has a somewhat staccato style that hits with a lot of power, while Tommye Blount is one of the most patient and intimate writers I’ve met.
I will say that there is a certain work ethic though. Detroiters tend not to be all that precious about the making of art. There is a sense of urgency in all the writers I named, a sense that something is always at stake. That something is rendered and interrogated with a sense of craftsmanship that I do think is a part of the Detroit vibe. There’s something about that combination of people wrestling with this deeply personal art form living somewhere that gets painted in the media with a broad brush that can’t handle the detail in our faces.
I agree with Carolyn Forche’s assertion that the personal and the political shouldn’t necessarily get to have their own rooms. In Detroit there’s just no way to engage the interior without seeing the ramifications of society on the self and the self on society. The city is basically being run by an unelected (governor appointed) official who wants to sell all of our Picasso paintings. That’s a sentence that exists today in America. It is a sentence that necessitates more attention on the art, music, and literature of Detroit.
On a similar note, how did music factor in to the writing of Hum and your current work? Which artists were in heavy rotation during the book’s inception and how can we see their influence within the poems, ordering, or visual aspects of Hum?
I think whatever connection music has to my poetry, it’s much more subtle for me than a lot of other writers I know. I know music is there pressing against the words but I don’t often see a direct impact on the language choices or prosody. “How to Disappear Completely” is named after a Radiohead song, so there is one of the more overt influences.
I purposefully left hip-hop alone while working on the poems that eventually became Hum. Having spent a brief moment producing and recording in the genre, it didn’t offer up as subject matter the kind of new challenges that were drawing me deeper into poetry. I follow what’s new and frightening and I wasn’t afraid of hip-hop. I was afraid of the interior. So that’s where I went. I didn’t think I could do that while lugging around the tropes and diction and political baggage of a musical genre, especially one other poets have already mined for far better poems than I’d ever produce with those materials.
Ordering is where a musical impact starts to show. One of my considerations was how to make it feel kind of like a good playlist or studio album. I love when the next track feels unexpected yet perfectly matched with the previous song. There’s a temptation when ordering a collection to put everything in the neatest thematic order possible (war poems all go here, love poems, you’re over there, etc). Hum is arguing for an intrinsic connection across many disparate people and things, so it made more sense for it to move in a way that felt varied while maintaining cohesion—like an album. I heard C. Dale Young call this organic ordering. I make sure to mention that every time it comes up so that he doesn’t retroactively fail me or something. I’m sure he has such powers.
I also wanted my “album” to have zero filler tracks. I was warned that a lot of young poets rush and that they try to put every poem they ever wrote in the first book—especially the previously published ones. It’s obvious why you can’t just throw a track on the album that isn’t mixed as well as the others and I think it should be just as obvious to poets. I asked every poem what it was doing in the book and “I look like those poems” or “I was published by that good journal” just weren’t good enough answers. Musicians are always cutting bad takes and dropping songs off albums. I hated that moment after Tupac and Biggie when everyone thought they needed a double album. They all produced mediocre at best projects that would have actually been solid if distilled down [to] the best songs. I fought with Hum until it was just above the minimum page count (49pgs). I just couldn’t fathom that every one of the 70+ poems that could fit and could work in the manuscript could argue they too were all songs from “Thriller.” Turns out none were, but you get what I’m saying.
New Author Bright
It has been my observation that writers (myself included) often ping pong between feelings of extreme egotism and self-loathing. What tactics do you use to quiet those dissonant states and find a more balanced, optimistic emotional space for yourself?
My answer to this question these days keeps coming back to the work. I’ve found that when I focus on the work there isn’t much time for feeling either grandiose or defeated. Those feelings come and go and the work stays. That’s what I tell myself when I need to get back up off the floor. I used to have this thing I called the “get off the bathroom floor” conversation with myself. It was so named because it helped me peel my face away from the tile on two separate occasions. I would basically run through what I should do next if I’m right that my poems are abominations and the fraud police are going to show up at any moment. Turns out the answer is always the same as what I would do if I could bring myself to wholly trust all the kind emails I get about my poems: try to write better poems. Write closer to the bone, think more carefully, listen more, read more. This is where my logic brain could overpower my anxiety; If I had to write poems anyway, and I had to try to do it better than before anyway, it doesn’t matter if I’m right or wrong about how much I suck. I might as well get off the floor and started.
Lately I’ve been feeling healthier around all this than I ever have. It helps that the book is out in the world having its own life, but more importantly, I’m just in a better emotional place generally. Looking back, it feels so cynical and arrogant to be wholly convinced that I was the only one smart enough to know that the poems that so many people support and connect to are actually terrible. Maybe they are, but it takes a certain kind of asshole to look at literally thousands of people and think you’ve duped them all. I learned to accept that other people connect to the poems even when I don’t believe in myself and eventually I just found myself worrying about it less and less one way or the other. I just do the work.
I’m enthralled by your poem, “How To Get The Gun Safely Out Of Your Mouth” and upon reading it, furiously emailed it to nearly everyone in my contacts, non-writers included. Can you name a poem to which you reacted similarly and describe that experience?
I know I should have some famous dead person cued up for these kinds of questions, but I just had that experience with the poet I mentioned earlier, Tommye Blount. He has two absurdly powerful and brilliant poems in the recent New England Review. It’s not easy to say which is more devastating, but “The Black Umbrella” is probably the jam. That Dickinson thing happened when I read the first poem, “What Are We Not For.” After “The Black Umbrella” I was undone. It’s so precise and engaging and deliberate. The poem never lets go.
Between residencies, touring in support of Hum, and your teaching position at the low-residency MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts, you’re constantly traveling. Though you have a more permanent home in Detroit, how does moving in and out of these liminal spaces of residency inform your writing habits? Are you able to draft poems on the road?
I draft pretty sparingly in general. It looks like I crank out poems to some people because the last couple of years I’ve submitted most of my new work to lit mags in big chunks. They all get picked up and come out in various journals over the next several months and looks like a steady stream of production. But those are poems I drafted and then spent the next several months (or a couple of years in many cases) thinking over and editing. Most of the new drafts happen in a single month and then I take the pieces that aren’t terrible and try to build working machines from this fan blower and that throttle. Anybody who has ever done a month with me in the Daily Grind writing group can attest that I barely ever write anything worth a damn. But if I build enough clumsy devices I usually end up finding the part another poem was missing, or I find the pieces to build a gizmo that works.
So, I don’t really generate new drafts on the road, but the road does feel like part of my writing process. I used to write all of my poems in my head back when I only recited them and never sent anything out for publication. I still find myself holding on to lines, or more often these days, images or strange connections. I always know I’m filing stuff away for later. I like to write when it feels like there’s so much in me I have to get it out so I can go back into the world and be filled with more chaos to parse.
The road also keeps me balanced and actually living. If I didn’t have an aspect to my life that consistently makes sure I end up in places where there are other humans, I probably wouldn’t do it much. I know I need to connect with other people, it’s why I write, but I kind of hate going outside. Most people assume I like being out because they only see me when I’m out. In small intervals, I can kill it as a human. But then I have to go hide and recover. That’s why I don’t go out on the road for much more than a few days usually.
I’ve also spent the last 10 years learning social skills and getting over a level of anxiety that has caused me panic attacks in the past. A long bout with stage fright that kept me off the road for a chunk of 2011 brought into relief how little face-to-face interacting I do when I’m not giving readings. I remember a particular two-week stretch where I didn’t go outside until I ran out of food. I went to the grocery store, used the automated checkout so I didn’t have to have to talk to anyone and then went back inside for another week or so. I’m also aware that I keep adding skillsets that make it dangerously easy to avoid the outdoors as a career (web design, editing, audio engineering, book design, video editing, color grading, etc). So touring is a way for me to know, when push comes to shove, that there’s a day on the calendar where I am contractually obligated to go outside and meet people.
Light Slot
Your academic experience was non-traditional, having leapt directly into Warren Wilson’s low-residency MFA program rather than an undergraduate degree. Do you champion even more non-traditional pathways to literary success, possibly outside of academia?
In the sense of academic experience I guess it was non-traditional, but if we pan out to the bigger picture of education, rather than just education in the academy, we can see that my route is actually pretty old-fashioned. I learned through self-study and mentorship just like most poets did before the very recent development of the creative writing workshop. I think the notion of learning poetry writing primarily inside the academy is somewhat non-traditional. Once upon a time, if you wanted to be a poet, you read a lot and followed the poet you revered around and begged them to mentor you. The first creative writing program was started in 1936—and remember, it didn’t spring up alongside several hundred other programs. America has to be the only place that thinks of a system created less than 90 years ago as being “traditional,” while the mode that predates said system by thousands of years is considered innovative. I hear professors complain about the workshop model all the time as if it’s this 2,000 year old, tried and trued system that we’re just stuck with. The thing hasn’t been around as long as network television and we’re already one generation or so from people having no clue what a TV network used to do. Yet we talk about the workshop model like it’s the sphinx or the Great Wall.
Sorry, been waiting for an excuse to bring that up in an interview. So, yeah, I do champion paths outside of the academy. But not because I’m on that generic “the academy is evil” bandwagon. I think the academy is vital to contemporary poetry right now for a few reasons, the most basic of which being that it puts food on certain tables and enables thousands to hear poetry readings for free. I also think workshops can be crazy useful at certain stages of a writing life. The most dangerous thing about the academy is probably that people think it’s the only route, which is absurd when you consider the range of personalities one finds at a lit conference. There’s no way all these people are supposed to have the same path and the same job description.
Then there’s just the practical job issues. There are too many poets graduating for everyone to work in the academy, so much of that is working itself out right now on its own. More and more people are wondering why they adjunct for schools with awful labor practices when they could bartend and get more work done, make more money, and have something more interesting to write about. It’s more important than ever for people to figure out if teaching is something they want to do, or something they’ve assumed they have to do to be a writer. Being a teacher is not for everyone and if we had less writers out there doing it because it seems to be the correct path, there would be more jobs for the people who live for being in front of a class.
Your second manuscript, The Big Book of Exit Strategies, has not yet been published. If you were to liken Hum to an artist’s debut album and The Big Book to his/her sophomore effort, who would you choose and why?
I’m going to go with Outkast on this one. I thought about Portishead and A Tribe Called Quest and Fiona Apple, but there’s something about the way Outkast seemed to transform sounds and go to this new place on Atliens while still maintaining the core of what made Southernplaylisticadalacfunkymusic a classic. I think the new manuscript is in conversation with the first while approaching new concerns and moving language around in ways that feel different for me. The poems are more intimate and mostly shorter than the average poem in Hum. I want to pull off that same impossible trick Outkast did, the sophomore that shows growth and doesn’t supplant the debut. Instead it complements it with its difference as much as its similarities.
Anna Claire Hodge is a PhD student at Florida State University and a recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in The Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Collagist, Willow Springs, Copper Nickel, MiPoesias and others. Her poems have been anthologized in It Was Written: Poems Inspired By Hip-Hop and Best New Poets 2013.
Jamaal May
Intense Blue 5x7
Jamaal May is the author Hum (Alice James Books, 2013) and The Big Book of Exit Strategies (Alice James Books, 2016). His first collection received a Lannan Foundation Grant, American Library Association’s Notable Book Award, and was named a finalist for the Tufts Discovery Award and an NAACP Image Award. Jamaal’s other honors include a Spirit of Detroit Award, the Wood Prize from Poetry, an Indiana Review Prize, and fellowships from The Stadler Center, The Kenyon Review, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy. Jamaal May’s poetry explores the tension between opposites to render a sonically rich argument for the interconnectivity of people, worlds, and ideas. He co-directs OW! Arts with Tarfia Faizullah.
For more visit www.OrganicWeaponArts.com
Follow on Twitter @JamaalMay
The Big Book of Exit Strategies
Publishers Weekly. 263.7 (Feb. 15, 2016): p43.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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The Big Book of Exit Strategies
Jamaal May. Alice James (UPNE, dist.), $15.95 trade paper (100p) ISBN 978-1938584-24-4
May follows his brilliant debut, Hum, with poems that are at once an extended ode to his hometown, Detroit, and a resounding protest against the many violent and oppressive ills that plague America, including gun violence and racism. The poems soar when May finds their center and grounds them in lived experience, revealing his genius for reframing old concepts into new images: "Coming black/ into the deep south,/ my friend says,/ is like returning/ to an elegant home/ you were beat in/ as a child." Similarly, when May lets his subconscious roam, each line seems to turn the next like a skeleton key opening an endless hallway of doors: "I am trying to say / the neighborhood is as tattered/ and feathered as anything else,/ as shadow pierced by sun/ and light parted/ by shadow-dance as anything else." Yet given the ambitious nature of the work, it's an uneven read. Some heavy subjects, such as war, are approached with grand metaphors instead of hard-hitting, grounded images. Other poems seem too overt in their intellectual or humorous intentions to maintain an element of surprise. These are presumably the growing pains of an excellent young poet treading unfamiliar ground, and like the Detroit that May describes, these poems are full of both shadow and light. (Apr.)
Hum
Mark Eleveld
Booklist. 110.6 (Nov. 15, 2013): p9.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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Hum. By Jamaal May. Nov. 2013.80p. Alice James, paper, $15.95 (9781938584022). 811.
May's first book of poems delves deeply, employs clever wordplay, and digs into the resonant hollow of empty space--a play on white noise that gets to the center of a universal rhythm: "or it could just as easily be a shaft of wood crumpling a man struck between spaulder and helm./But now, with the rain making a noisy erasure / of this town, it is the flash that arrives / and leaves at nearly the same moment." Mostly told in free verse, Hum takes on big themes: the destruction of the body and an exploration of love and forgiveness, power and fear, drugs and death. May is a storyteller, and his imagery is often easily decipherable. What's more, he pays attention to sound: "Yes, the needle / of Mother's scream, as the thumb was machined / clean off, brought icicles down. The boy listened for the sea. / Gripped his shovel. Gripped his oar. Now, in a waiting / room, he bows to the florescent hum and begs." A gripping first collection.--Mark Eleveld
Eleveld, Mark
Hum
Publishers Weekly. 260.38 (Sept. 23, 2013): p55.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Hum
Jamaal May. Alice James (Consortium, dist.), $15.95 (80p) ISBN 978-1-938584-02-2
May's debut lends beauty and order to contemporary consciousness through airtight poems that still allow the reader room to breathe. Linguistically acrobatic, these poems render the violence of a body's undoing--by war, by drugs--and the mind's in ways that are beautifully crafted, whether formal or free, and resistant to sentimentality. "Hold a pomegranate in your palm,/ imagine ways to split it, think of the breaking/ skin as shrapnel. Remember granada/ means grenade because grenade/ takes its name from the fruit,/ so identify war by what it takes away." This book relentlessly explores power and forgiveness, love and fear: "I don't expect you to look into ink/ sprawled across a supremacist's flesh/ and find a thrush vibrating with birdsong,/ but I want to find more than just/ the cawing of crows." While using the word "political" to describe poems can be problematic, May, a teacher, seems acutely aware of the injustices in our current condition, but he seeks to educate rather than preach; his poems, exquisitely balanced by a sharp intelligence mixed with earnestness, makes his debut a marvel. (Nov.)
Jamaal May’s The Big Book of Exit Strategies
by SYCAMORE REVIEW
Review By: Bess Cooley, Managing Editor
Birds searching for bread. A fist fight. Fences. Lampposts. All these in the first two poems, immediately setting up Jamaal May’s second poetry collection, The Big Book of Exit Strategies. This is an urban book, a book of city landscapes—particularly Detroit, the author’s hometown. The second poem in this collection, “There Are Birds Here,” immediately subverts expectations of what Detroit will look like in this book. After May writes that bread is torn for the birds “like confetti,” he clarifies:
I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton,
I said confetti, and no
not the confetti
a tank can make out of a building.
I mean the confetti
a boy can’t stop smiling about…
51nVO4qqpQL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_ May debunks the assumption that people can’t be happy in this city. And the rest of the book, too, is a love poem, an address, an ode. Though May writes of shootings, of war, it’s a book of joy that simultaneously calls for a re-seeing of his city. Detroit so often brings to mind harsh poverty, decrepit houses, bankruptcy, a city in desperate need. And May doesn’t necessarily deny that—it would be impossible to. He looks at the beauty in his city as much as the tragedy.
When he does write of guns and murders, the images are superb and somehow beautiful. From “The Gun Joke”: “This is definitely not a joke, / and then his laughter cracked through me / like electrostatic—funny how that works.” Then in the following poem, “Hoplophobia”: “I can’t help but remember / how a pocket knife once whispered open / and snarled at my mother’s belly.” Those words fire, better than the guns May writes of. Look, he’s saying, this is terribly beautiful. But these poems don’t make me want to sit in my chair and read them and be sad. They make me want to go to Detroit and Ferguson and everywhere in the country and do something. I want to tear down barriers and yell in the streets. May, it seems, wants to, too. This is real poetry. Poetry that engages, demands, poetry that says, Look at my beautiful city. Honor it. Take joy in it. Do something for it. All over these pages, May seems to feel some sense of duty, some obligation to Detroit and to America. He makes anyone reading the book feel it, too, along with joy. It’s no small feat, but it’s entirely necessary here.
I tried to list my favorite poems from The Big Book of Exit Strategies, got to ten, and had to stop. I dog-eared so many of these pages. Because May says everything so well, I’ll end with his ending, his last poem. To start it, he goes back to cutting onions, from a previous poem, which speaks to some pattern he seems to be trying to work out in this book, anything that recurs and recurs. He makes fun of himself for thinking this way: “It was ridiculous of me to think / anyone would see this / as a metaphor…” Then Jamaal May does what Jamaal May does: he lets it be.
The sizzling skillet, round and full
of what I’ve cried over to cut
is not a metaphor for anything.
It is only delicious,
as all leaving things are.
The Big Book of Exit Strategies
100 pages, $16.95
ISBN: 978-1-93858-424-4
The Big Book of Exit Strategies
Posted January 9, 2017 by DM O'Connor in Poetry, Special Interest 1
The Big Book of Exit Strategies
The Big Book of Exit Strategies
by Jamaal May
Released April 12, 2016
Format: Paperback
Pages: 100
ISBN: 9781938584244
Published by Alice James Books
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“My nostalgia is a pyromaniac
I follow into a condemned barn
that once served as a night club
as if there were a dance
left in any of us.”
-Jamaal May, The Tendencies of Walls
Jamaal May’s second poetry collection, The Big Book of Exit Strategies is a tender force with serious reckoning. From the mundane slicing of a finger while cutting an onion to Zombie Jesus plugging his email address to make $$ at home—there are serious issues being debated under a shining slick veneer. Although the poems have a wide range and style, the common thread that ties the collection together is Detroit City; even when not directly mentioned, the rhythm of Motown, the cold wind blowing off the lake down the derelict streets and a deep sense of nostalgia fills each poem.
In the poem, “Shift,” May takes a comic stab at the working poor. The narrative aspect pulls together an autobiographical story of working as an audio-visual aid at The Hyatt Regency Dearborn. May turns the personal universal. We have all held those dead-end jobs. We have all had those dead-beat supervisors. We know where this is going, but like a spoken-word stand-up comic who magically pulled the rug out from under you, may turns profound on the last stanza:
I’d learned that I’d work any job this hard, ache
like this to know that I could always ache for something.
There’s a hell for people like us
where we shovel the coal we have mined ourselves
into furnaces that have burned the flesh from out bones
nightly, and we never miss a shift.
The Big Book of Exit Strategies has belly laughs jammed up against gut stabs. Jamaal May wins his readers over and then patiently dissects his issues with wisdom and skill and generous empathy. Whoever says poetry is dead, has not read Jamaal May’s cunning collection “The Big Book of Exit Strategies” but they should because there is nothing dead in this volume. Image, voice, beauty and pain is alive and well in Detroit, and so exactingly personal, it is universal.
The Big Book of Exit Strategies
Author
Jamaal May
Publisher
Alice James Books
Year
2016
Type
Poetry Book
Find on
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The Big Book of Exit Strategies by Jamaal May
The Big Book of Exit Strategies (Alice James Books, April 2016)
by Stephen Burt
May’s 2013 debut, Hum, turned heads with its formal inventions (sestinas, a series of conceits about rare phobias) and its unrelenting attention to damaged places and damaged bodies—Gulf War veterans, victims of street violence, sites and scenes in May’s native Detroit. His follow-up holds often wilder, looser verse on the same and similar topics: “In the open mouths of our many graves,” one page begins, “are the teeth of our many friends.” “War took our prayers like nothing else can, / left us dumber than remote drones.” The urgency, the omnipresent fears—May is often in fight-or-flight mode—and the search for new figures, new forms, are still there, though some of the forms themselves are new to May (for example, an abbreviated crown of seven sonnets). New, too, are poems addressing the tough days and humiliating tasks of mental-health workers and psychiatric-hospital staff: “I scour these rooms where air / closes like fists on the handrims of a wheel chair.” Another poem begins with flat, frightening fact—“my shift supervisor / at a runaway shelter strip-searched six teenagers”—then modulates into meditation on the poet’s own character, his willingness to “work any job this hard.” Other characters feel divided against themselves, deeply false, as if method-acting their own lives: “Death Scene in a Psychiatric Ward,” for example, carries the telling subtitle “What’s my motivation?” Each poem is its own performance, its own disturbance in the dangerous air. Yet the book also keeps one eye on the street, on the Detroit upbringing to which the poet returns: “Detroit, when I said you’re dreaming, I meant, / you are dreaming. Keep making me up.”
This review originally appeared in American Poets, Spring-Summer 2016.
Review of Hum by Jamaal May
September 5, 2014 | REVIEW
Jamaal May. Hum. Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2013. 74pp. $15.95, paper.
Jamaal May’s self-reflexive debut, Hum, is musically understated, performative yet private, a spiritual voice in dialogue with a post-industrial landscape. “Dedicated to the interior lives of Detroiters and the memory of David Blair,” the book takes its formal structure from the combination of that landscape with the speaker’s anxieties, which range from the mundane to the mortal. But ultimately, the book invests the word “hum” with a particular sense of the human, a spiritual music that finds its way up from between May’s words and defies straightforward analysis.
The book opens with a poem entitled “Still Life,” an anaphoric series of images of a boy costuming himself and playing imaginatively with urban detritus ranging from barbed wire and bent nails to a bath-towel cape. The end of the poem takes an inward turn with the lines, “Boy with a boy / in his head kept quiet / by humming a lullaby / of static and burble.” The first of many references to “humming” throughout the text, one might read these lines as a self-portrait or analogue of the author as a young man and a description of Hum’s nascent project. But only a few lines after this framing of the poetic text as personal solace, that project is placed in jeopardy. May writes of rust as a metaphorical thief the boy “doesn’t see / but knows / is coming tomorrow / to swallow his song.” This tension between the transformative potential of creativity and the consumptive action of time seems central to Hum, underlying the anxieties that structure the text.
May’s marriage of interior life to external form is unusually intricate, particularly for a poet’s first book. Many poets have used the sestina, a traditional Italian form in which lines end with particular words that repeat according to a mathematical pattern, to explore themes of obsession or anxiety. The second and second-to-last poems in Hum are sestinas that share a single set of end-words: “machine,” “ignore,” “sea,” “snow,” “needle,” and “waiting.” Six other poems in the body of the manuscript take their titles from phobias associated with those end-words. Such ambitious projects often come at the expense of attention to individual poems, but the eight poems of Hum’s spine each feel as carefully conceived as the overarching structure itself. “The Hum of Zug Island,” the book’s second sestina and penultimate poem, even earned May a Pushcart Prize. However, the function of these formal devices is not simply to impress; they build the themes of obsession and anxiety into the structure of the text itself.
Though subjects such as “snow” and “waiting” may seem rather mundane foci for phobias, in May’s poems these subjects become pathways through anxiety into trauma, raising questions that resound long after the poems end. “Chionophobia: Fear of Snow” is a second-person elegy in which we know the deceased protagonist only as “you.” In the poem, the windblown ash and sand of a combat zone recall the snow in which “you” and “your brother” played as children:
Can two snowflakes be the same
on a ghost-white street where enough gather
to construct faceless snowmen? In this desert,
sand blinds the way snow did back home.
Your brother patches holes
in men with names he can’t or won’t learn,
and wonders if, somehow, you are still here,
using an earthmover to pour sand
into foxholes.
These lines highlight the particularity of the minute and familiar—snowflakes, grains of sand—while also pointing out the anonymity of bodies in war. How can snowflakes be unique when survival seems to depend on blinding ourselves to the individuality of the suffering and dead? Images of “your brother” and “you” patching and filling holes may gesture toward healing and peace, but the comfort they provide restores neither the identities of the soldiers nor the landscape.
The poem continues, weaving meditatively between images of past and present, sand and snow, before arriving at the apparent source of the protagonist’s fear. When a fruit stand appears to shiver in the desert heat, “your brother” recalls how his family heard the news of “your” death:
Your brother shivers
remembering your mother’s shiver,
the way she sank to the ground, heavy
with news, and your body comes home again.
Your bone-colored casket repeats
its descent, sinks under the flag, and a thud
resounds. Fades. He still hears it.
In these lines the poem’s dichotomous elements blur together, resolving momentarily into a scene where sand and snow, innocence and mortality, the living and the dead all coexist paradoxically. The leaping progression of images through which we arrive at this transcendent moment not only makes rhythmic and resonant connections between disparate settings, it also reflects the fact that post-traumatic stress is often triggered by seemingly innocuous experiences.
Such associative leaps are common in May’s work, but they seem particularly suited to describing the dissociation experienced by this poem’s speaker. In the final lines of “Chionophobia: Fear of Snow,” May capitalizes on this dissociation as well as the second-person mode of address to enact the protagonist’s identity crisis on the reader: “Deafening like footfalls / against the icy driveway, resonant / like your mother’s voice, calling / the wrong name—your name—again.” The ambiguity of identity in these lines shifts attention from the protagonist’s grief over the trauma of his brother’s death to the realization of his own mortality. And this artful closing completes the poem’s journey from a phobia’s innocuous trigger through personal trauma to the temporal source of so many obsessive anxieties.
While this review has focused on how the poems that act as Hum’s most explicit structural elements explore the speakers’ anxieties about time and mortality, the other eighty percent of the text also deserves critical attention. The images and themes introduced in the sestinas and phobia poems recur throughout the book, adding to the impression of anxiety while re-contextualizing key words and images in surprising ways. As mentioned above, Hum is intimately concerned with Detroit’s post-industrial landscape and legacy, and several of the poems explore relationships between humans and machines in terms that are both spiritual and bleakly realistic. In “Hum for the Machine God,” a title which plays on the word “hymn” as well as other meanings of “hum,” a boy prays for his abusive father to be injured but feels remorse when his prayer is granted more brutally than anticipated. In “On Metal” a handful of lay mechanics huddle around a broken down car as the speaker realizes that the human body and the tradition of mechanical repair—both of which he reveres with a nearly religious sense of mystery—are rapidly being rendered obsolete by computerization. And in “Hum of the Machinist’s Lover,” a machinist serenades an automaton he’s created, but whom his breathing corrodes. In these poems, the speakers’ anxieties about mortality intertwine with spiritual tradition and technological innovation to render a portrait of the human condition during a distinctly postmodern moment.
May intricately weaves together these themes and others to create a wide-ranging and surprisingly coherent debut. But what makes Hum remarkable, perhaps more than its structural sophistication or thematic content, is the intimacy and authenticity May’s voice conveys as he thinks and feels his way through each line and stanza. In “Thalassophobia: Fear of the Sea,” a poem addressed to the Detroit poet David Blair who drowned tragically at a young age, May writes:
. . . You know
I get like this sometimes—I listen
for footsteps that will never come,
remember waves I’ve never seen,
watch them fold and break and slowly
whet stones that jut up from coastlines,
and today I learn something old
about the sea . . .
In these lines May makes himself vulnerable by sharing his creative process—a process of discovery in which imagination blends with memory and sensual perception—with someone he loves. And while not all of the poems in the book exhibit that process as explicitly as “Thalassophobia,” an impression of May’s vulnerability suffuses his poetry. Formal sophistication and conceptual implication may make Hum a significant work of literature, but it is May’s human touch that fills these poems with the irreducible combination of feeling and music.
David Winter wrote the chapbook Safe House (Thrush Press, 2013). His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Meridian, Four Way Review, Union Station, and Forklift, Ohio. He is an MFA student at The Ohio State University, where he teaches creative writing and composition, and serves as a poetry editor for The Journal. You can visit him at davidwinter (dot) net.
Hum by Jamaal May
A Review by Corrina Bain, Book Reviewer
Picture
Jamaal May’s Hum (Alice James, 2013), winner of the 2012 Beatrice Hawley Award, is a startlingly beautiful debut, long anticipated by those who know of May via his chapbook press, Organic Weapon Arts, or his videos, or the magic of his performance. The collection is fueled by compelling contrasts between a difficult, often ugly reality, and an aesthetic capable of finding beauty in anything. It is a book of contrasts between innocence and experience, and a book of place, intimately and proudly about Detroit (and how satisfying it is that Detroit be shown every inch as mythic as Blake’s London.) May is also doing one of the most urgent works of the poet, to show the fractal containment of people and their environment—what befalls the city comes into the lives of individual people.
The ugly and the beautiful are not just counterposed, they rely on each other, as in the poem “Hum for the Stone”:
A boy feels a broken brick
strike between shoulders.
The next stone breaks
against his nose as he turns,
and if not for the many ribbons
of blood sliding between
fingers, one could think
he was doubled over
with laughter. Celebration
in the convulsions.
Beyond the tension between loveliness and violence, the author’s well-crafted, deliberate language and his wild reality make Hum crackle with life. The lyric and the narrative also inter-rely upon each other. Poems that would otherwise be vehicles of uncomplicated grief become larger, more ornately worked, beautiful and mythic, as is the case in “The Sky, Now Black With Birds,” a meditation on the hate crime murder of James Byrd and the execution of Troy Davis:
I wanted Brewer dead.
So dead, my tongue swelled fat with hexes, so fat
I wonder how forgive could ever fit inside my mouth.
Somehow it’s always there, fluttering in the larynx
of Ross Byrd—the man whose father was dragged,
urine soaked, by Brewer behind a truck.
Watch him say it.
Forgive.
I swear,
the word has feathers.
Several times in the book, May is able to give us rich gifts of this nature, valorizing human lives which a pseudo-generic white American consciousness is just as happy to invisibilize and devalue.
In a parallel thread, May introduces us to the characters of several children, each of them bringing their freshness, but never with the easy fiction that innocence will save you. In the opening poem:
Boy with a safety pin-clasped
bath towel of a cape
tucking exacto knife into sock.
Boy with rocks…
…
Boy with a guardian
daemon and flawless skin.
The children here let us see ourselves, our adult emotions rendered at once literal and symbolic. The children are illustrations. Play is not innocent but a precursor of adult struggles for competence and image. For example, in a later poem: "In a backyard, a boy learns a boomerang / doesn’t come back to you only your location."
In “On Metal,” we see the fusion of the mechanical and human, as the auto industry fails to offer its former protection to a group of mechanics who can’t wrangle a car’s computerized parts:
No one is happy to learn what an afternoon of chafed
knuckles, metal on skin, no longer solves. What can’t
be pulled from the steel tangle under a hood
*
As a reviewer part of my job is to try to needle books apart instead of just liking them immensely. So what can I needle away from May? If there is anything missing from the collection, and it is probably not even missing but rather obscured, it is a quality of romantic intimacy. Somehow, the ‘eye’ which May turns toward Detroit, towards machines, towards familial love, detailed and exacting and also nearly flighty in its lyricism, does not show us May in love or his love objects clearly. “Hum of the Machinist’s Lover” is essentially cute, (“Eyes flicker // like flashlights are behind / them because flashlights are / behind them”) although it does dovetail nicely with the Detroit/machine theme. “Macrophobia” and “I Do Have a Seam” are the other obvious love poems in the collection, and both of them address a woman who is virtually invisible, assumed to be present. The emotion rings less true, or at least less accessible, than the feeling evoked in the poems on other subjects.
Is this a significant problem with the collection? I don’t find it so. Any number of people write lucid, believable love poems (probably everyone who makes it through their adolescence manages to write, or at least be capable of writing, a really good love poem once in their lives.) The gifts May has when he conveys the pain and rapture of the city and its machines, or when he gestures towards death, are at least as rich as conventional love poems and far more unique.
Also, although I have so thoroughly convinced myself of my correctness that I hardly feel the need to keep saying it, May’s work is further proof of the nonsensical distinction between academic and performance poetry. May’s command of language, his deliberateness, and his facility with form are impossible to ignore. And how was he driven to arrive at that level of mastery? How did he get through an MFA with the urgency and wildness and humanity of voice still intact? I would argue, through a background in performance and poetry slam. Language is a tool that May is using, not to make ornaments, but to externalize his reality, to give himself to the reader.
So here again, we find a mutual reliance, between craft and urgency, between voice and text, just as May finds “celebration in the convulsions,” the reliance between beauty and ugliness, between innocence and experience, between violence and – what? What really is the opposite of violence? To know, intimately, the inner life of what you had hurt. To long for peace, while knowing that peace is impossible.
MARCH 4, 2014 ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT, BOOKS
Book review: Jamaal May’s “Hum” poetry
Jamaal May is a Detroit writer and performer that reads, writes and teaches poetry for a living.
The hum of machinery, automobiles, and the beating pulse of life within oneself are the prominent themes running through Detroit native Jamaal May’s 2012 Beatrice Hawley Award-winning book of poetry, Hum. The rhythmic vibration of language and alliteration bleeds through the page, allowing readers to feel the beat of emotion as the poems reveal urban settings tainted by crime, drugs, and machinery.
Dark pages scatter the book, starting with black and gradually lightening to gray, each showcasing a poem written about a phobia. The first phobia poem, “Athazagoraphobia: Fear of Being Ignored,” dives into a list of ways the speaker tries to gain attention from peers, parents and significant others.
I pierced my eyebrow, inserted
a stainless steel bar, traded that for a scar in a melee, pressed
tongue to nipple in a well-lit parking lot, swerved
into traffic while unbuttoning my shirt –
As each darkened page reveals another phobia, others arise, tangled in the text without being prominently displayed like the other darkened pages, titled “Thalassophobia: Fear of the Sea,” “Aichmophobia: Fear of Needles,” “Mechanophobia: Fear of Machines,” and “Macrophobia: Fear of Waiting.”
The poems explore city life where bullets scatter the ground, needles are found in the grass, and children watch “the teeth / of the handcuffs close around your wrists the way / a perched bird watches: quiet, flinching at slight sounds.” With such a harsh environment, it is realistic to live with the phobias depicted in “Hum,” each child growing up seeing and knowing more than they should.
May sets some poems in couplet stanzas, prose and concrete formats, each fitting the message and making the voice thrive. In one poem, “I Do Have a Seam,” he arranges the words of the poem to look like ribs, illustrating the seam that the speaker wants a woman to stitch. The speaker allows his heart to hum for this woman, saying “I’ve always wanted / to be the thread, spooled through / the sewing machine of your hands.”
The poet digs to the bottom of inner-city culture and reveals acts with such vibrancy that the emotions and actions can be felt through the pages. May unveils broken Detroit and the struggle for life, love and happiness with undeniable passion.
Microreview: Jamaal May, HUM
JOELLE BIELE
Jun 26, 2014
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HUM
Jamaal May
Alice James books, $15.95 (paper)
The Detroit of Jamaal May’s debut collection, Hum, is littered with broken glass, shattered vials, and discarded syringes. Noting the empty shells of grand colonials lining the streets and battered cars sitting on cinder blocks, May argues against romanticizing urban decay. He compares Detroit to a battle zone where ball-field dugouts are foxholes and Marines recruit students from local high schools. Aside from a few scattered crows, there is not a bird in sight, unless you count feathers in a puddle or down in a teenager’s winter jacket, his gun tucked underneath. In May’s skilled hands, Keats’s urn becomes a Chinese takeout box and Wordsworth’s abbey spires are belching Zug Island factories. A poet as machinist, May makes art out of found objects, welding his lines with parallel structure and commands. One boy appears with “roof shingles / duct taped to shins and forearms / threading barbed wire through pant loops,” and a lover is made of zinc and copper, her tutu “a nickel-plated half / circle with pleats hammered / one by one.” Hum demands that those left behind by economic upheaval say their piece. To a young boy asked to deny his love of language and join the military, May offers courage: “You stand nameless in front of a tank against / those who would rather see you pull a pin / from a grenade than pull a pen / from your backpack. Jontae, / they are afraid.”