Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Starshine & Clay
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.kamilahaishamoon.org/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/kamilah-aisha-moon * https://www.agnesscott.edu/english/faculty/kamilah-moon.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2009205113
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2009205113
HEADING: Moon, Kamilah Aisha
000 00396cz a2200145n 450
001 8129023
005 20170208144432.0
008 091223n| azannaabn |n aaa c
010 __ |a no2009205113
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca08345817
040 __ |a TNJ |b eng |c TNJ |d DLC |e rda
053 _0 |a PS3563.O5614
100 1_ |a Moon, Kamilah Aisha
670 __ |a Moon, K.A. Vision at sunset, 1995: |b t.p. (Kamilah Aisha Moon)
953 __ |b rg04
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Paine College, B.A.; Sarah Lawrence College, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, poet, and educator. Agnes Scott College, Decatur, GA, assistant professor of poetry and creative writing; instructor at colleges, including Rutgers University Newark, Medgar Evers College, Adelphi University, Drew University, and Columbia University.
AWARDS:Pushcart Prize; Lambda Award finalist; recipient of fellowships to Vermont Studio Center, Rose O’Neill Literary House, Center for Faith and Work, Hedgebrook, and Cave Canem.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille T. Dungy, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2009; Collective Brightness, Sibling Rivaly Press, 2011; Villanelles, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series, 2012; and the Pushcart Press Anthology, Pushcart Press, 2015. Contributor to periodicals, including Harvard Review, Waxwing, Tupelo Review, Callaloo, Oxford American, Prairie Schooner, and Poem-A-Day.
SIDELIGHTS
Poet and educator Kamilah Aisha Moon is a Pushcart Prize winner and an assistant professor of poetry and creative writing at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. She has also taught at Rutgers University Newark, Medgar Evers College CUNY, Drew University, Adelphi University, and at Columbia University. In addition to the Pushcart Prize, Moon’s work has been recognized in her status as a 2015 New American Poet and by her nomination for a Lambda Award. She holds a B.A. from Paine College and an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College.
She Has a Name
In She Has a Name, Moon’s debut poetry collection, she “explores the intersecting perspectives and experiences of a family, centering around a young woman—sister, daughter, student—with autism. This central figure grounds the collection, sometimes speaking herself, but more often is described from various, sometimes contradicting points of view,” commented Lindsay King-Miller, writing in the online magazine Muzzle. The collection “works with great sensitivity in its invitation to readers to empathize with an experience that’s largely and unnecessarily hidden from public discourse,” observed Rigoberto Gonzalez in the Los Angeles Review of Books Online.
Throughout the collection, Moon avoids creating a false sense of sympathy or undeserved pity for the poems’ narrators. Though the topic is emotionally sensitive, “Moon’s poems are nuanced with simultaneous grit and tenderness, encompassing a complex range of familial emotions and masterfully slipping in and out of its speaker’s psyches,” commented Rumpus website reviewer Melissa Leigh Gore. Moon allows the speakers in the poems to “voice their anxieties, regrets, and feelings of guilt,” Gonzalez observed, such as older sister Ish’s conflicted emotions about living away from home and sometimes failing her autistic sister as they were growing up. Gore noted, “the collection is strongest in its gestures towards universality through the examination of the particular.”
“Moon’s poems innovate and build on our well-known folktales of what it means to be a family, moving these archetypal characters apart through space and time so that the reader can feel the bonds that irresistibly pull them back together again.,”” commented King-Miller. “A compassionate writer with a delicate touch, Moon navigates emotive territory with commendable grace,” Gonzalez concluded.
Starshine & Clay
Starshine & Clay, Moon’s second poetry collection, presents readers with a “much-needed testament to the world’s beauty and shortcomings,” observed Judy Westhale on the website Lambda Literary. In these poems, Moon “rages against racist violence in America . . . while also finding moments of beauty in nature as well as human kindness,” noted a Publishers Weekly writer. Familiar names from recent news reports of unrestrained police violence appear here—Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner—with Moon creating the effect that brutality from public protectors can erupt unexpectedly. These modern episodes are contrasted with historical events such as lynching, concentration camps, and slavery, and are given a context in which racially based violence has long been a bane to humankind.
With other poems in the collection, “Moon writes anthems, restoring life from ruin, memorializing those exploited, displaced, murdered. Each poem’s a jewel for those lynched, hunted, killed,” commented a Washington Independent Review of Books contributor. In one poem, she notes how a close friend lives on as an organ donor. Westhale concluded that in Starshine & Clay, there can be found nothing “ordinary, nothing common about Moon’s writing, which holds a bright light to darkness and says, come forward.”
In an interview with Jenny Johnson on the website Waxwing, Moon commented on the role poetry plays in preserving history and culture. “Poems often serve as cultural artifacts of an era, and poets can function as emotional historians, expressing the feelings behind the facts of what happened,” she stated. Moon further told Johnson, “, the greatest response to trauma and attempted annihilation is to create, to speak one’s truth and peace. To honor the agony, writing in such a way that these occurrences can’t be turned away from because people are suffering.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, June 26, 2017, review of Starshine & Clay, p. 152.
ONLINE
Agnes Scott College Website, http://www.agnesscott.edu/ (April 15, 2018), biography of Kamilah Aisha Moon.
Kamilah Aisha Moon Website, http://www.kamilahaishamoon.org (April 15, 2017).
Lambda Literary, https://www.lambdaliterary.org/ (February 11, 2018), Judy Westhale, review of Starshine & Clay.
Los Angeles Review of Books Online, https://lareviewofbooks.org (Jan 18, 2014), Rigoberto Gonzalez, review of She Has A Name
Muzzle, https://www.muzzlemagazine.com/ (April 15, 2018), Lindsay King-Miller, review of She Has A Name.
Poets & Writers Readings & Workshops Blog, http://www.pw.org/ (November 4, 2013), “Kamilah Aisha Moon on Nurturing and Celebrating Intergenerational Voices,” profile of Kamilah Aisha Moon.
Poets.org, http://www.poets.org/ (April 15, 2018), biographky of Kamilah Aisha Moon.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net (Sep 18, 2017), Brian Spears, review of Starshine & Clay; (May 14, 2014), Melissa Leigh Gore, review of She Has A Name.
Silent Beaches, http://www.silentbeaches.com/ (April 15, 2018), biography of Kamilah Aisha Moon.
Washington Independent Review of Books Online, http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ (Oct 18, 2017), review of Starshine & Clay.
Waxwing, http://www.waxwingmag.org/ (April 15, 2018), Jenny Johnson, “An Interview with Kamilah Aisha Moon.”
A Pushcart Prize winner, Lambda Award finalist and a 2015 New American Poet who has received fellowships to Vermont Studio Center, Rose O'Neill Literary House, Center for Faith and Work, Hedgebrook and Cave Canem, Moon's work has been featured widely, including in Harvard Review, Poem-A-Day, Prairie Schooner, Best of the Net and elsewhere. Featured nationally at conferences, festivals and universities including the Library of Congress and Princeton University, she holds an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and has taught at several institutions, including Rutgers University-Newark and Columbia University. A native of Nashville, TN, she is an Assistant Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College.
poet
Kamilah Aisha Moon
Kamilah Aisha Moon
Related Schools & Movements:
Contemporary
Kamilah Aisha Moon received a BA from Paine College and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of Starshine & Clay (Four Way Books, 2017) and She Has a Name (Four Way Books, 2013). Her honors include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Cave Canem, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Prague Summer Writing Institute, and the Vermont Studio Center. She teaches at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, Georgia.
Kamilah Aisha Moon
Assistant Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing
Contact Information
Phone: 404.471.6895
Email: kmoon@agnesscott.edu
Office Location: Buttrick 323
Office Hours: Spring 2018
Tuesday, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
and by appointment
Academic Degrees
B.A., Paine College
M.F.A., Sarah Lawrence College
Teaching and Scholarly Interests
Kamilah Moon is a Pushcart Prize winning poet, and a Lambda award finalist. She has taught poetry at Rutgers University, Medgar Evers College (CUNY, Brooklyn), Adelphi University, and Drew University.
Professional Activities
Poetry Collection:
Starshine and Clay, Four Way Books, 2017 (forthcoming)
She Has a Name, Four Way Books, 2013
Creative Non-fiction Chapbook:
On Nascency, The Center for Faith and Work, 2015.
Professor Moon has published poems in literary magazines and journals, including The Prairie Schooner, Waxwing, Tupelo Review, Connotations Press, among others. She has also contributed to selected anthologies including Pushcart Prize Anthology 2015 (Pushcart Press, 2014), Villanelles (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series, 2012), Collective Brightness (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2011), Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2009)
Web Links
Kamilah Aisha Moon's Website
Department of English Website
Kamilah Aisha Moon on Nurturing and Celebrating Intergenerational Voices
READINGS & WORKSHOPS BLOG
11.4.13
Printable Version
Log in to Send
Log in to Save
Twitter logo
Facebook logo
Tumblr logo
Pinterest
P&W-funded Kamilah Aisha Moon currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, and is the author of She Has a Name (Four Way Books). A recipient of fellowships to the Prague Summer Writing Institute, the Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center, Moon's work has been featured in several journals and anthologies, including Harvard Review, jubilat, Sou’wester, Oxford American, Lumina, Callaloo, Villanelles, Gathering Ground, and The Ringing Ear. She has taught English and Creative Writing at Medgar Evers College-CUNY, Drew University, and Adelphi University. Moon holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.
Kamilah Aisha Moon author photoPoets & Writers funds a wonderful workshop at a senior citizen recreational center in Manhattan called the Lincoln Square Neighborhood Center. A good friend of mine, Samantha Thornhill, regularly facilitates the workshop. I recently had the pleasure of being a guest instructor for one session, and it was an afternoon that I will continue to treasure for many reasons. What a treat to sit at the table with these women and experience their hard-won insights and revelations, their beauty. To witness their respect for what reading and writing poetry has always afforded them—how it delights, soothes and edifies; the sweet and profound awe it inspires.
Poetry is time travel. The opening free-write exercise “Give me back...” asked the women to reflect on the past. They transformed as they shared fifteen minutes later the many reveries they brought back to life, eyes sparkling as they showed through metaphor and great sensory detail what they once had and who they used to be "back in the day," and what their once young, supple bodies could accomplish (one of the ladies being a dancer). "Give me back my long, luxurious curls...nights with my husband before the kids came along. Just give me back my husband, gone now." They recalled what mattered and still does, expressed gratitude for what rose in the wake of loss along the way. There was sensuality, sass, and a healthy irreverence from a woman in her eighties as she read mantras for living that got her this far in life, until her respiratory problems took over and shortened her time in our session.
We discussed persona poems, compared lyric to narrative poetry, and explored space as breath in a poem. We studied form as the setting and craft as tools to compose these word-diamonds we hew from our personal experiences. The afternoon sun poured into the windows; we all glowed. It reminded me of the line in a Rumi poem, “Sunlight fell upon the wall / the wall received a borrowed splendor.” The sheen of discovery, recognition, acknowledgment, and transcendence filled the room. I always want to remember and keep sacred that this is a human business. As poet Jon Sands often says, we are “emotional historians.”
Two years ago, I taught a Poets & Writers-sponsored workshop filled with sixth grade honor students at the Young Women's Leadership Academy in Queens. For ten weeks, we focused on elements of craft and discussed the work of published poets, unpacking what each poem had to offer us. We created an anthology. These girls were gifted and bright beyond their young years, their poems suffused simultaneously with innocence and wisdom. Kristalyn proclaimed, “My name is a dragon / just like me! It has power / and can let loose.” In an ode to her fingers, Tearah wrote “You clasp my knuckles in prayer...you hold my pen, my writing sword!”
The young women made me hopeful for their individual futures and the future of the world. The more mature ladies filled me with the strength to face my own golden years with grace, and to handle the inevitable curves and challenges ahead with the same aplomb they exhibited. I was struck by how, in both workshops, the students' faces shone with the same wonder, and conveyed a careful stewardship and thoughtfulness when giving such astute feedback and suggestions. I was honored to encourage the young women to experience poetry for the first time, and equally honored to witness many of the older women use poetry to relive some major events that shaped their lives.
Among the many important moments, both of these workshops affirmed that poetry contains a brilliance that we can access and own for a lifetime. Through poetry, we can transform ourselves and change others as we sit around each other's poems like campfires for warmth and sustenance. For as long as we can hold our “writing swords,” we possess the power to draw breath, to speak, and to listen.
Photo: Kamilah Aisha Moon. Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
Support for Readings/Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the A.K. Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.
Kamilah Aisha Moon is a recipient of fellowships from several literary organizations such as the Rose O’Neill Literary House and the Vermont Studio Center. Kamilah Aisha Moon’s work has been featured widely, including Harvard Review, Poem-A-Day for the Academy of American Poets and Prairie Schooner. A Pushcart Prize winner, her poetry collection She Has a Name (Four Way Books) was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Audre Lorde Award from the Publishing Triangle. Moon has taught English and Creative Writing for many organizations and institutions, most recently as a Visiting Professor at Rutgers-Newark. Featured nationally in conferences and venues that include the Library of Congress, she has been selected as a New American Poet presented by the Poetry Society of America. Moon holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, and her next poetry collection with Four Way Books is forthcoming in 2017.
An Interview with Kamilah Aisha Moon
Jenny Johnson
Jenny Johnson: I heard Camille Dungy give a talk recently, and she said of poets, “we are the record keepers.” In fact, she reminded listeners that in order to speak dynamically about the world you have to: “Take notes.” Do you think of your poems as a form of recordkeeping?
Kamilah Aisha Moon: Absolutely. Poems often serve as cultural artifacts of an era, and poets can function as emotional historians, expressing the feelings behind the facts of what happened.
JJ: I am thinking specifically about the second section of Starshine & Clay, which opens with an epigraph (“who is the human in this place, / the thing that is dragged or the dragger?”) from Lucille Clifton’s poem, “Jasper Texas 1998,” a poem in which James Byrd, Jr. speaks. Like Clifton, you reengage narratives recorded by the news media. For example, in “Samaria Rice, Tamir’s Mother,” we hear Samaria’s voice speaking, as a simultaneous narrative about her son’s death “loops on & on.” I’m also thinking of “Angel,” which questions the language used by the media to characterize Michael Brown and then beautifully and critically complicates this record. How would you describe the work you’re doing in this section of your book?
KAM: “An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times ... how can you be an artist and NOT reflect the times? That to me is the definition of an artist.” — Nina Simone
I am in full agreement with Ms. Simone. Also, the greatest response to trauma and attempted annihilation is to create, to speak one’s truth and peace. To honor the agony, writing in such a way that these occurrences can’t be turned away from because people are suffering. People who have never deserved this kind of brutality. People who have participated fully in a nation that has not fully acknowledged and respected them — like including the fact that Walter Scott served in the armed forces in “Perfect Form,” yet was shot like a dog and we have his murder on video. The poems in this section seek to amplify the humanity that had to be stripped in order for any of these events to even be possible. They interrogate the idea of worthiness, of who and what is “good.” Out of many things that have been infuriating about these tragedies, I’ve been appalled by newscasters, pundits and people on social media focusing on irrelevant details to justify these murders and avoid the root causes. These poems endeavor to bring the focus back to where it belongs.
JJ: I would love to hear you talk about Lucille Clifton’s influence on this collection and on the title of your book. I’m curious, when did you first encounter Clifton’s poems? Is there a story?
KAM: I first encountered Lucille Clifton’s poems in the archives at Fisk University. I had just finished high school, and the few poems I read then made an impression, but it wasn’t until I completely embraced that I was a writer about six years later that I read Good Woman, and then started to read everything I could get my hands on by her. I consider it a huge blessing that I was able to meet her at Cave Canem, have a poem workshopped by her, read on the same dais and simply be in her presence a few times before she became an ancestor. Because she was a generous person, this is not a unique experience. She welcomed and encouraged countless poets.
In terms of her aesthetic influence, I’ve always deeply admired her astonishing clarity and ability to make complex ideas and emotions accessible to everyone. She had a way of distilling truth to its most potent essence. Her poems appear sparse on the page, yet are leagues-deep in their explorations. This quality is certainly among my goals as a writer. However, this book ranges widely in form, voice, style and content. I needed a large title to encompass the physical, emotional and spiritual wrestling occurring in these poems. Her iconic poem, “won’t you celebrate with me,” is about the making of a self, the daily triumph over adversity that is a part of breathing. The difficult miracle of it all. So her line about life being a “... bridge between starshine and clay” perfectly aligned with the reckoning of the body and spirit threaded throughout my book. We are literally made of these two things, and live between them. Lorraine Hansberry’s play, A Raisin In the Sun, explores a family’s deferred dreams; it is apt that she chose the title from a line in Langston Hughes’ poem that does similar work. So in the tradition of many writers in conversation with each other across space and time, this title is a bow to her.
JJ: The poems in this book are also wise emotional historians (to use your poignant phrase) of romantic heartbreak. Two of my favorite poems that do this work are “Wish” and “Ex-Crossing.” I felt like crying and laughing when I read the line in “Ex-Crossing”: “I wave & I mean it both ways.” It’s so good. It’s such a concise way of describing the multiple urges one sometimes feels when seeing an ex. I wonder if you have a favorite line or phrase from this series of poems that you would be willing to talk more about?
KAM: The romantic realm remains the most mysterious and elusive one for me, and the poems in this section are definitely feeling along the wall in the dark for a light switch. The poem, “One Reason Why Parts of Speech Matter,” about truly understanding the difference between the word “treasure” as a verb versus a noun, is the one I hope for the opportunity to live in real time. A treasure is often buried or sits on a shelf to collect dust until needed. But when you treasure something, it is an active, constant tending. Yes, that’s what I’m talking about! Especially in the context of romantic love.
JJ: There’s such formal range and dexterity in this collection. Often when experimenting with received forms I think about Adrienne Rich’s essay, “Format and Form,” in which she says: “It’s a struggle not to let the form take over, lapse into format, assimilate the poetry; and that very struggle can produce a movement, a music, of its own.” How do you arrive at a particular form for a poem?
KAM: It took me awhile to understand the beauty of received forms, to experience them as “a welcome cage,” as Rita Dove describes them. When writing about topics that are large and often overwhelming, form allows you to enter in a manner that can be managed. Adhering to its criteria makes your brain work in ways that are unusual and refreshing.
For the poem, “Peeling Potatoes at Terezin Concentration Camp,” I chose the villanelle because of the repetitive nature of the form, building in meaning and impact like an obsessive lullaby (which always tend to be scary, ironically). In terms of content, my mind kept returning to a small photograph that had been in the room that had served as the kitchen. It was a picture of detainees peeling potatoes. How mundane and odd in such a place, was my first thought. Secondly I thought, “How terrible to prepare dinner for your executioners?!”
I knew that this photograph was the content — the common, repetitive action of peeling potatoes as the metaphor for the vicious end these people were about to face. Old story, new way to view it; a way to remember the ferocity in order to guard against its resurrection. Simple, direct language. Image-driven, quiet so that the violence screams between the lines.
Peeling Potatoes at Terezin Concentration Camp
Ribbons of skin pile at our feet;
we count wet orbs like heads.
Beneath the blades, white meat.
Their kitchens are not kosher, or neat.
The knives engrave our dread.
Ribbons of skin pile at our feet.
They will salt these crops, a doomed fleet
torn from the earth’s cold bed.
Beneath the blades, white meat
to be mashed or boiled, a treat
ravished to nothing but shreds.
Ribbons of skin pile at our feet,
flesh carved in dangling sheets —
slice after jagged slice spread
beneath the blades, white meat.
We work under the glare, a street
of eyes gouged and shed.
Ribbons of skin pile at our feet.
Beneath the blades, white meat.
This poem needed to be a persona poem as the potato peelers/detainees. Writing it was a revelation to me in so many ways. It set the bar high in terms of paying attention to when to use which tools from the creativity box. Leontyne Price said of her singing voice, “My voice has thousands of colors. And I tap one at will to express what I’m doing. It’s instinctive.” It showed me the importance of being deliberate and listening to what each poem needs to accomplish over any ideas that the ego may have in mind.
JJ: I am also interested in the decision that you made to break the sestina form, upending the order of the end words, when writing “Eternal Stand.” In the Notes section you let the reader know that “this is a sestina that breaks form when the flood waters enter this poem.”
KAM: So when writing “Eternal Stand,” I began true to form, but something else kept trying to come through. The photograph of the statue “clutching” the confederate flag was so visceral. I remembered that Dove’s poem “Parsley” about the Dominican dictator Trujillo also departed from form. Sometimes form is the on-ramp to the highway of what the poem needs. It seemed to me that what needed to be said weighed more than sticking true to form in this case.
JJ: At the end of your poem, “The First Time I Saw My Mother Without Her Prosthesis,” you write: “I couldn’t say no — her love / never flinched, neither would I.” At times, I found myself stunned by what I would call an imagistic endurance in your poems, not only a refusal to flinch, but also a generous persistence to say more through description or metaphor. You are a poet who seems unafraid to hold the gaze on what you have set out to describe. Would you be willing to talk about a poem that was difficult to complete or a set of images that you struggled with?
KAM: The poems around fibroids and surgery felt tender to write. It is a silent epidemic. I can’t tell you how many women have told me their stories after hearing one of these poems. But no one talks openly about them. Ruminating about what they are, where they might originate, and fighting them for the sanctity of my body was a different, vulnerable place to be for me as a writer. I think I may just be at the beginning of that journey.
JJ: You recently joined the faculty at Agnes Scott College as Assistant Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing. What is one poem by a writer you admire that you are particularly excited to share with your students this fall? And why?
KAM: This is a difficult question. I love so many poets and poems; making syllabi and not being able to teach them all hurts. But God willing and the creek don’t rise, I have many semesters ahead to fill with amazing poems that have much to teach us. I’m excited about teaching Ross Gay’s work this semester. “Spoon” is incredible for many reasons that would take up much more space. So for this question, I’ll say that his concise, potent elegy for Eric Garner, “A Small Needful Fact,” is one that I look forward to unpacking with my students. The best poets are keen observers, and what he does with this detail from his obituary — a job that he held planting for the Parks and Rec department — restored his humanity that was stripped by those cops and by the media coverage that ensued after his violent, senseless death. His focus on the enormity of the absence of his invaluable life coupled with the goodness of his labor still helping the world is deeply moving. I also pair this poem with “Frederick Douglass” by Robert Hayden and have the students complete a prompt where they take the “DNA” of a poem of their choice and create a new draft. Sadly, Gay’s poem is the grandson of Hayden’s in terms of theme (when will black men be allowed their full humanity in this country; the lives grown out of preceding life, etc.), and expertly in terms of craft — the pacing, syntax, lyricism. It’s a knockout.
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521930898525 1/6
Print Marked Items
Starshine & Clay
Publishers Weekly.
264.26 (June 26, 2017): p152.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Starshine & Clay
Kamilah Aisha Moon. FourWay, $15.95 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-1-935536-95-6
Moon (She Has a Name) rages against racist violence in America in her second collection, while also
finding moments of beauty in nature as well as human kindness. The specter of police brutality looms large
as she lists its victims, including Michael Brown ("man child shattered/ in a broken promised land"), Eric
Garner, and Tamir Rice. Moon elegantly imagines the quiet despair of Rice's mother: "nothing bangs the
screen door/ or needs new shoes, nothing eats my cooking." She juxtaposes these current events with their
historical counterparts--lynchings, concentration camps, slavery--and a skillful sestina about a Jefferson
Davis statue in Mississippi illuminates the lingering terror of Confederate memorials. Moon advances
benevolence as an antidote to the poison of persecution. She writes of a deceased friend living on in the
form of organ donation: "I must have dined near what remains/ of you, faithful organ/ thriving in a body."
And despite instances of cliched metaphors, she crafts some remarkable imagery, particularly when
describing her mother's chest after a partial mastectomy ("Not a half-carved/ turkey, thankless,/ but a
woman") as well as her own experience undergoing uterine surgery. Throughout, Moon explores the body
and the many traumas it must absorb, confronting death, survival, and the space in between with grace and
radiance. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Starshine & Clay." Publishers Weekly, 26 June 2017, p. 152. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497444228/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0b1b25df.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497444228
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521930898525 2/6
Reunion: The Violence and the Joy of
Black Lives in Aracelis Girmay's The
Black Maria
Tara Betts
The American Poetry Review.
46.1 (January-February 2017): p9+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 World Poetry, Inc.
https://www.aprweb.org/
Full Text:
ARACELIS GIRMAY'S INTERCONNECTED POEMS IN HER THIRD collection, The Black Maria,
make for a moving suite of poems that relate to police brutality. The book begins with poems about Eritrean
history that relay the violence that has haunted the country's history, but the book eventually turns to
violence in America with a series of numbered poems that address the growing epidemic of police brutality.
The flow and associations that she makes between police brutality and how it threatens home and
motherhood for the poet herself is written in her distinct voice, and evades a level of didacticism that people
expect in political poems. The timeliness and the emotional chords that Girmay strikes picks up the tradition
of poets like Audre Lorde and June Jordan (even as Girmay quotes Jordan's "Sunflower Sonnet Number
Two").
The last section, which holds the same title as the book, announces a litany of names of poets and victims of
police brutality on the page that precedes the section. No spaces appear between the names that run
together, much like the frequency of names arriving too frequently in the news. Beneath the tickertape of
those names, there is a definition of black maria as the flat dark surfaces that look like basins or water
bodies on the moon. That idea of something appearing to be one thing when it's actually another resonates
with how black people are assumed to be criminals when they are often something altogether different. This
information helps build a foreground that's further fortified by an excerpt from James Baldwin's essay "A
Letter to My Nephew." In the excerpt, Baldwin discusses the monumental effort it takes to create and
cultivate a person from infancy to adulthood. In these three distinct pieces of information, Girmay
underscores the value of life.
I found myself particularly intrigued by some of these twelve poems because, within that final section, there
are numbered poems that I will call "The Estrangements." A few of the titles repeat, and this lends itself to
the circling around the recurrent theme of fear of violence perpetuated by powerful forces. The opening
poem bears the same title as the book and the section and establishes a scene by naming black objects, then
putting the color black in historical context:
black the raven, black the dapples on the moon & horses, black sleep of
night & the night's idea,
black the piano, white its teeth but black its gums & mind with which
we serenade the black maria ...
1600s: European ships heave fatly with the weight of black grief, black
flesh, black people, across the sea; the
astronomers think the moon's dark marks are also seas & call them "the
black maria." (73)
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521930898525 3/6
As the poem unfolds, this idea of language and names for the sea progresses and reveals a woman rereading
a page of Anna Karenina in the Sahara for years, and the lines of text look like "the waves of the black
maria." This consuming image of rereading in a distant place calls on this idea of something that is cyclical
and repetitive and always developing, much like a person that Girmay seeks to acknowledge in the
following poems or the lines that follow the Saharan woman:
Language is something like this. A hard studying of cells under a
microscope, cells on their way to becoming other things: a person, a book,
a moon. (73)
In discovering what language is and naming the sea, moon, and language, Girmay begins to see the
difficulty and the unsettling memory in names, which supports the earlier memories embedded in Eritrean
history earlier in the book, but it also serves as a prelude to mention the slain people, including Renisha
McBride, Trayvon Martin, and Rekia Boyd:
Naming, however kind, is always an act of estrangement. (To put
into language that which can't be
put.) & someone who does not love you cannot name you right, &
even "moon" can't carry the moon (74)
The poem concludes with this idea of estrangement, where Girmay describes the waters of oceans
darkening with names and bodies. In doing so, the poem illustrates the monumental loss of lives gathering
and pooling.
This leads to "Third Estrangement, In Memory of Jonathan Ferrell." These "Estrangement" poems do not
operate in numerical order, and this seemingly random order reflects the seemingly disparate nature of
memory that flouts chronology. Jonathan Ferrell was killed on September 14, 2013, after crashing his car
and knocking on a nearby resident's door. The resident didn't answer the door but instead called the police.
Although this poem doesn't necessarily detail his situation, the speaker is leaving the house "to talk about
love" with her girl, but "her head is already in the news" so the speaker turns around in the fog, and wonders
about the hunter in the dark who can be heard nearby and may be waiting. In this way, even the most
mundane act of leaving the house to meet a friend, when you think you might be able to ask for help, seems
dangerous.
"The Woodlice, Fourth Estrangement" functions like a sort of short origin story that relates where fear of
the unfamiliar begins. When a sister has "smuggled the woodlice / into her pockets & then into / the house,
after a day's work," she carries them to bed with her "so that they would have / two blankets & be warm, for
/ this is what she knew of love" (77). As the woodlice become more familiar with the bed, the speaker
likens their traveling there to being carried by children and moonlight into the dark holds of ships and
adapting to life in fields. It is the girl's older sisters who have seen what enslavers and killers can do; this
experience is described as "being / older, being more ugly & afraid," and so they must teach her "the lessons
/ of dirt & fear." These lessons will teach the younger sister what to exclude and what threatens her safety.
Much like Muriel Rukeyser's "St. Roach," Girmay's poem points to the human failing of recognizing life,
even if it differs from our own.
In "The Fig Eaters, Fifth Estrangement," there is a beautiful and wild sister reminiscent of Elena
Poniatowska's Lilus Kikus. The sister climbs trees to collect ripe figs. In the tree, the first hint at violence is
made:
to pluck the slow jewels of the fig eaters
from their habitat, those bugs whose mouths
were made only to eat what is soft
already, what is worn with rot, & whose mouths,
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521930898525 4/6
for we were not among the hunters,
had not evolved to hurt us ... (78)
Even here, the bugs are harmless for what is ripe and alive; they eat what is rotting. The house sustains "the
small girl & the world of beetles" and "heavy heart-sacs of the figs," and there are not siblings between her
and the father, so the speaker thinks of her own father's grief in the absence "from his country & his custody
& house" (79). The poem expands yet again in its last three lines when "There was relief to know / we were
no longer the only ones for whom/he'd weep, though this, too, was our trouble, our wound" (79). Girmay
places the grief of a father's exile next to the ongoing grief of people being killed as a persistent conflict
where wounds are not allowed to heal.
When Girmay leaves sisterhood, she begins to explore motherhood in "First Estrangement," explaining that
she does "not remember back then / when I was trying to leave one world for the next" while her "girlmother"
is on the table. She remembers her when she cracks "open the (already) starlight of the
pomegranate" as she gives birth herself. This estrangement from the body cannot be reneged, and the
mystery of a new body emerging cannot be denied.
"Moon for Aisha" is an epistolary poem for one of Girmay's contemporaries, Kamilah Aisha Moon. As the
letter progresses, Girmay is remembering a ten-year-old self who is longing for a sister. In the second half
of the poem, Girmay envisions a woman older than both of them and serves as Moon's namesake. It is
moments like this that levity amplifies the value of life.
"Cooley High, Fifth Estrangement" is set in 1991 and opens with a description of the early 1990s numberone
R&B hit "Uhh Ahh" by Boyz II Men on their debut album Cooleyhighharmony. When the speaker
remembers the song rising out of her mother's car's tape deck, it makes the speaker break down in tears.
This sonic recollection is rooted in the speaker being driven by a mother to their first year at boarding
school. When the poem mentions "ghosts of children from the Perris Indian School," the poem is alluding to
the breaking and torture of people to assimilate, and some might actually die. At the midpoint of the poem,
two lines encapsulate the severing of one way of life from another: "... The school gate is--a carving knife. /
This is the future Mom chooses for me ..." (83). Although the poem explains how this "estrangement" is for
the speaker's talents and their own good, it is clear that the speaker is looking back on this opportunity as
another subtle form of violence:
I am quiet, & let her say
This is the best thing'
though I disbelieve it, even now.
She was my mother, after all,
& president of nothing. (84-85)
That last sentence emphasizes the mother's powerlessness in the world, but her one power is to provide for
her child's ability to flourish in spite of their circumstances.
"The Beauty of the World, Tenth Estrangement" is written in the first person, presumably by the student in
the preceding poem. It is this student "who defended / the beauties of darkness (my worlds!) / in the grey,
official halls of School" and "who thought I could not love both Virgil & Lumumba" (86). These lines draw
demarcations between Eurocentric masters and African liberators like Patrice Lumumba, and the student is
not willing to give either of them up in another kind of cruel cutting away of the past.
The pair of poems "Second Estrangement" and "Third Estrangement" are similar in word choices that shift
to subtly change the meaning of becoming a stranger and being surrounded by strangers that we are taught
to perceive as dangerous. "Second Estrangement" requests in its first line to "Please raise your hand" as the
poem describes being a child lost in a market or a mall and calling for a parent, only to see faces "utterly
foreign, utterly not the one that loves you" and the child becomes " ... a bird suddenly / stunned by the glass
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521930898525 5/6
partitions / of rooms" (88). The child experiences an early "estrangement" in a world that is "tall, & filled,
finally, with strangers" (88). In this last line, we see how everything looms large and unfamiliar for a child.
The "Third Estrangement" is dedicated to Renisha McBride, and humanizes the perspective of the poem
that precedes it. Although the poem has mostly the same words with different enjambment, its phrasing
changes in the remaining six lines. The "you" is no longer a bird, but simply "you / suddenly stunned by
glass partitions" where one is not naive and helpless as a bird unaware of glass. Unlike "Second
Estrangement," the scenario includes the "you" as an adult in a world full of "angers" instead of "strangers"
in the last line. This dropping of two letters for a new word altogether makes this idea of violence ominous
all over again, especially when one considers that McBride was shot while asking for help.
The second poem entitled "The Black Maria" consists of eight sections over 12 pages, and begins with a
2007 anecdote from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. As one who studies space, he reflects on people
who might not have made it to where he has, and the epigraph preceding deGrasse Tyson's reflection
explains that police stopped him more than once when he was attempting to study the stars. The staggered
lines of those first four pages relate how a boy studying the skies with a telescope becomes a "suspect" who
possibly has "a weapon," even as the rest of the poem becomes a study in how one body is connected to
other bodies, like the speaker, the sky, a friend in the hospital, the boy looking at the sky, and the cops.
The five-page poem "Fourth Estrangement, With a Petition for the Reunion of Jonathan & George Jackson"
concludes this section and the entire book with a meditation on a trek through San Michele in Venice, Italy,
an area also known as "The Island of the Dead." The travelers also see Cannaregio, "home of history's first
ghetto,/a Jewish ghetto," and this awareness makes the "estrangement" in the earlier poems even clearer.
The speaker posits a grim realization:
What changes? Does not change?
What if the enslavement & The Severances
were seen as persecution of our own black godliness?
Our holiness or specialness? Except, instead, I believe
the terror & the beauty that the water teaches:
no one is special, no one is special (104-105)
Girmay relays another kind of severing when she thinks not of the biblical kin of Jacob, but the more recent
20th-century Jonathan Jackson, who attempted to break his older brother, George Jackson, out of prison on
August 7, 1970. Jonathan Jackson was killed during this attempt. George Jackson was killed by a prison
guard the following year. In spite of these deaths, Girmay still finds hope:
I know that death is also real
& with my bit of life petition
for the reunion of Jonathan & George,
& while I'm at it, Virgil Lamar & James Jr. Ware,
because there are stars, bat none of you, to spare,
& Margaret Garner & her child, & Abraham
& Sahalu, ...
let us name every air between strangers "Reunion." (106)
Calling on these ancestors allows Girmay to corral names together in an almost sacred fashion. This
gathering of names makes the idea of "strangers" less acceptable than the isolation created by the
unfamiliar. Margaret Garner no longer has to kill her daughter to prevent her enslavement. Jonathan and
George are brothers, alive and together again. Virgil Lamar Ware is alive to hug his Daddy Ware, and not
gunned down on the day that four little girls were blown up in a church in Birmingham, and the Jewish kin
of Abraham and Sahalu find each other again, as if to spite the violence and death that they have
encountered. In 33 pages, Girmay offers a compelling concluding section bound to her international
heritage and the terrors encountered on the streets of America.
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521930898525 6/6
TARA BETTS is the author of the poetry collections Break the Habit (Trio House Press, 2016) and Arc &
Hue. Tara holds an MFA from New England College and a Ph.D. from Binghamton University. Her poems,
essays, and short stories have appeared in several magazines and anthologies, including POETRY magazine,
Essence, Octavio's Brood, and The Break Beat Poets. Tara currently teaches at University of IllinoisChicago.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Betts, Tara. "Reunion: The Violence and the Joy of Black Lives in Aracelis Girmay's The Black Maria." The
American Poetry Review, Jan.-Feb. 2017, p. 9+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A476409163/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=094611df.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476409163
Starshine & Clay by Kamilah Aisha Moon. Four Way Books. 112 pages.
Moon writes anthems, restoring life from ruin, memorializing those exploited, displaced, murdered. Each poem’s a jewel for those lynched, hunted, killed. The massacre at Emmanuel AME Charleston, South Carolina 6.17. 15 is titled “Felicia Sanders’s Granddaughter, 5”: “Grandma was on top of me, warm. /Perfume, powder, sweat and smoke/stung my nose. I felt her heart/beating fast, so fast like after I run/but there was nowhere to run”; and in the poem “Samaria Rice, Tamir’s Mother”: “Broken hearts bound/by yellow tape. Done living at this address of can’t, /of never again, of not sorry for our loss. /Feels pointless, let me live the whole truth now/that my family has been shattered…” Literature triumphs when one has to recuperate from its force. When does Kamilah Aisha Moon make a difference? Whenever she writes a poem; there’s no high fat content in these words. It’s learned truth, muscular and viable.
It all works because of technique. Moon begins each poem a different way. Her entries are like entering a room with great expectations. Her poems come from a mind softened many nights in reading, before the writing occurs. It’s a learned work with managed strategies of good craft as carriage. Poets who try for levels of persuasion don’t persuade. Poets like Moon who rely on the radical facts of our humanity, and describe them well, produce a physical as well as mental response. Some poems here make my heart beat fast. This heroic writing is in the spirit of Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddamn!
Kamilah Aisha Moon has written one of the most moving poetry books I’ve encountered in a while. At the center of She Has A Name is a young woman with autism who, despite her high-functioning capabilities, is still subjected to the sometimes stifling overprotective behavior of her family: “We send for guardian angels — / please — sweep down in case / our love isn’t / enough.”
A family dynamic — not exactly a family drama — unfolds as Moon allows the different members of the household (parents, sister Ish, and Middle Sister) to voice their anxieties, regrets, and feelings of guilt. Oldest sister Ish, who has moved away from home, feels particularly conflicted (“Each visit home frays me, / the price I pay for being able to drive away.”), especially after her parents make clear that as they “depreciate,” the responsibility of looking out for the youngest member of the family will be hers.
Ish’s relationship to her youngest sister reveals a compelling history: as much as she celebrates her sister’s triumphs — like her first vote (“a lone ballot / never counted so much”) and her dance recital — she also admits to the times she privileged her own interests instead. From the poem “Sorry”:
Buried moments when
I’ve forsaken you — for instance —
your graduation-night dinner I skipped
to see a concert.
Such simple honesty brings to light the hushed or taboo conversations about the complex experience of growing up in a home with a family member with special needs. To Moon’s credit, she doesn’t portray Ish and her parents as burdened or martyred, but as ordinary people whose errors in judgment and impulsive thoughts are part of their individual journeys, not that of their charge. In turn, the youngest sister is also treated with dignity because she arrives at her own insights about her condition independently of her family’s perspectives, despite the fact that they’re usually within earshot. It’s only when a family member encroaches on her path that they are all reminded of how fragile this tread-carefully arrangement really is, easily susceptible to missteps. On one occasion, the young woman gets to fly solo:
free to defy
Autism’s gravity and simply be
the passenger in seat 13E.
She was coasting,
a look-ma-no-hands smile
resplendent on her face.
My fear
shortened her ride,
as I led her by the hand
to the front of the line,
telling the attendant
to keep watch
that she is different.
[…]
“Why did you do that to me?”
The youngest sister, having endured embarrassment at having to climb “that short yellow bus” all this time, feels betrayed by Ish’s inability to “give her the space / to look like herself.”
She Has A Name works with great sensitivity in its invitation to readers to empathize with an experience that’s largely and unnecessarily hidden from public discourse. Polite silence suggests shame and sustains a stigma against expressing, let alone validating, complicated emotions such as those felt by Ish. By the conclusion of the book, there are no prescriptions given or life lessons imparted; the takeaway is the intimate portrait of the family itself, which comes across no less troubled, no more afflicted than any other, despite its unique challenges, a true testament to that family’s efforts to attain its strength: “Often all we have / are banged-up blessings.”
A compassionate writer with a delicate touch, Moon navigates emotive territory with commendable grace.
SHE HAS A NAME BY KAMILAH AISHA MOON
REVIEWED BY MELISSA LEIGH GORE
May 14th, 2014
She Has a Name never actually names its primary subject–the autistic sister of its primary speaker–whose family unit is rounded out by a stifled, loving father, a sledge of a mother staunch in her battle for her daughter’s rights, and two elder sisters. The latter fight with words or flying playground fists to defend their “clawless” sibling even as they struggle with understanding what “magnetic tongues” might lure her out from internal music. Self-styled in its epigraph as “biomythography” in the tradition of Audre Lorde’s Zami, the collection is strongest in its gestures towards universality through the examination of the particular. Via a steady injection of iconography among the details of family life, Kamilah Aisha Moon’s debut weaves a kaleidoscopic set of poems with intimate insight and textural multiplicity.
We might expect that poems about a family grappling with autism would suffer from a one-dimensional saccharine pity, but Moon’s poems are nuanced with simultaneous grit and tenderness, encompassing a complex range of familial emotions and masterfully slipping in and out of its speaker’s psyches. Some of my favorite portions of the book emerge when the speaker is the mother or father, or when their distinct blend of fierce love and protectiveness is juxtaposed with an honest look at their simultaneous loss of self. In “Names,” the father-speaker is resolute in his acquiescence:
I’ll work myself into pulp; withhold
my tongue and practice nothingness.
Cockroach logic: if I don’t move,
I’m not really against this wall,
back gleaming in harsh light.
I won’t hold my wife’s hand and skip words
like stones. I’ll become a dike of a man,
fall asleep in front of the TV
nightly until I burst.
The poems that consider the inner life of the father are imbued with honest loss, even as his simultaneous love for his daughter overwhelms him. The mother is similarly portrayed, begging her other daughters not to allow their sister to be institutionalized in “Directions”:
…Promise me she won’t inhale
the ammonia smell of group mess halls,
wince at the prying fingers of hired help.
Even so, we see the toll that her self-sacrifice takes from another daughter’s point of view. The glimpse of her own despair in “Outbursts” cuts deeply and strikes me as an archetypal look at mothers who hold families together through sheer force of will. She is yet another woman of steel seen in her private pain through the crack of a bedroom door:
Mama, as my hands look more and more
like yours, I want to use them–
use them to gather orchids and zinnias
to give you now
rather than bittersweet petals
sprinkled on mahogany.
I watched you through
a cracked bedroom door
sobbing on the bed
with pantyhose around your ankles.
Dinner still on time.
The moments of joy that sparkle in the poems are only aided by these interludes into quiet suffering, perhaps because they allow for catharsis and relief. In “Memory in the Park,” the daughter plays on the swing-set alone for the first time with glee:
I remember the day when she swung
back and forth unattended–beaming
as giggles rode the wind shotgun with her.
I saw her pleasure naked.
I saw it.
Some of the later poems in She Has a Name consider topics outside the insular circle of family life, but in the context of the book they are always deeply informed by the speaker’s personal history. Immersion in personal struggle and a tenderness for the misunderstood means that Moon’s poems caress extra-familial subjects with gentle consideration. My favorite poem in the work features a woman crying on the bus, “Watching a Woman on the M101 Express”:
Oblivious to the metro’s bump and buck,
to the toddler begging in Spanish to be freed
from her stroller, to my ogling, you sit
embalmed, racooned, or moosed. You have
the kind of eyes that never quite close,
even in deepest sleep, lids
an undersized t-shirt that leaves belly
exposed. Tears navigate moles, veteran
swimmers of your creek-bed face.
Strong in their universalization of the particular, Moon knows many urban dwellers have seen emotion on display on the bus, or had a family member who struggled: formative experiences that color our approach to her poems. Not unlike the archetypal mother behind the bedroom door, “Dust” describes the experience of dismantling the living space of a presumably deceased grandmother whose piano is caked with dust. Nostalgia and longing take residence alongside the consideration of how material objects are imbued with emotive power:
Often all we have
are banged-up blessings.
Please, don’t
move this dust
that has danced in this air
for thousands of mornings,
our mingled skins
glitter caught in sunlight.
Aisha_Author_OfficialWho among us has not been left behind, tasked with cleaning out the material detritus of a loved-one’s spent life? Moon excels at the description of these moments, the ones we share, universal in their specificity. Her poetry is most poignant, immediate, and effective when it is rooted in the minutiae of life, cataloging small injustices and momentary pleasures. She resides firmly here throughout the book, not only giving name and voice to the daughter-subject of She Has a Name, but also offering a way of considering joy alongside conflict, pain, and struggle. In an interview with Nadine Lockhart of Superstition Review, Moon echoes the universality, the expression of human condition that I felt when reading the book as an intended device:
“This is any of us, all of us. Unsure of how to handle something we don’t understand, perhaps misplacing anger or shutting down for awhile… No matter what our individual struggles, we are self-determining and wrestle with our desires and needs. We are all here. We each and all have a name.”
For all of us who long to be named, Moon’s verse comes alongside us with a warm and honest sensibility. Whatever the challenges presented within the work, the current of hope and possibility remains buoyant and ever-present. Like the speaker of the final poem, “A Superwoman Chooses Another Way to Fly,” we, too, can “rise, shoulder blades / aching to split open and bloom.”
Melissa Leigh Gore is a poet and tech geek who lives and works in Boston, MA. She received her MA in English & WGS from Brandeis University, where she wrote a thesis about "body language" in the poetry of Sharon Olds. If she had a feminist chess team, she would name it "A Rook of Her Own." You can find her on Twitter: @ML_Gore or at melissaleighgore.com More from this author →
She Has a Name by Kamilah Aisha Moon
A Review by Lindsay King-Miller, Book Reviewer
Picture
She Has a Name, the debut collection of poems by Kamilah Aisha Moon, explores the intersecting perspectives and experiences of a family, centering around a young woman – sister, daughter, student – with autism. This central figure grounds the collection, sometimes speaking herself, but more often is described from various, sometimes contradicting points of view. Moon defines the book as a “biomythography,” Audre Lorde's word for the mythologizing of history and autobiography, translating stories from reality into legend. Here, the subject of that legend isn't the central character or even autism itself, but the concepts of home, intimacy, and family, described in the nearly timeless language of myth. Moon's poems innovate and build on our well-known folktales of what it means to be a family, moving these archetypal characters apart through space and time so that the reader can feel the bonds that irresistibly pull them back together again.
In “Borderless Country,” the collection's first poem, the difficulties of a loved one with autism are introduced, along with the sense of disconnection this diagnosis brings: “Souls we love turned / like the faces of flowers thrust / toward a rogue sun.” From the beginning, through Moon's spare, almost conversational, but deceptively evocative language, the reader understands this to be a story of both love and loneliness, of a distance that can never be fully traversed. Describing autism as “the catch-all / phrase that drops kids off / at nowhere,” Moon elegantly conveys how having a name for what separates you from someone you love does not make the separation easier to bear.
The interweaving voices of each member of this family – the parents, both separately and in unison; the sisters, of which the poet is one; and the girl with autism – are distinct from each other yet harmonious. The family resemblance is clear. In “The last thing,” the girl's father says “Held her as long / as any father's strength could stand / her growing weight. / What next?” (Many of the poems in the voices of family members are untitled; these pieces are identified here as well as in the book's table of contents by their first lines.) Meanwhile, in “I watched the backs,” the mother says “My husband says nothing, / his kisses shallow. / What we don't say / we eat.” This is an evocative portrait of a family whose resources are stretched beyond capacity – elsewhere, the father says “I'm not allowed to say / I don't want to pay / what she will cost us” – but who find the strength to hold each other nonetheless. This material is both prosaic and mythical, because myth is, at its core, about surpassing the possible. In She Has a Name, Moon makes limitations painfully real so that transcendence can be all the more triumphant.
The strain to reconcile what is possible and what is necessary is expressed through small details of privation and generosity. In “Pinwheel,” the ordinary sights and sounds of a day running errands is too much for the autistic sister, who has a meltdown, familiar stimuli “crashing against the rocks / of her mind's shore.” Here, the older sisters wish for freedom, the ability “to twirl free / and not be undone.” However, in “Love is a Basic Science,” Moon writes:
It wasn't extraordinary in our minds
to love her,
to let her know,
holding on until she squeezed back.
The gesture of holding on contrasted with the gesture of escape creates an intense but mostly internal struggle. Moon's clear, honest language – short lines, unadorned syntax, vivid images – makes the reader feel this struggle as physical tension.
Interestingly, throughout the poems in She Has a Name, neither the youngest sister nor any member of the family, except the poet (referred to as Ish), are named. They are defined by their relationships to the main character, relationships that ground and center even as they stretch and evolve. Though the family resemblance may fade and differences become more pronounced – as the middle sister says, “Linger; we become distinct” – no one in this family can shed their roles or shirk the responsibility that comes with them. In “Directions,” the mother urges her two eldest to keep a close watch on their younger sister when their parents are gone. The middle sister follows this with, “We know 'watch your sister' means forever.” These are the simple words of a conversation between relatives, but by stripping away the excess and letting love and duty hold their own, Moon transforms everyday phrases into timeless myths.
In addition to explorations of family and love, She Has a Name is filled with the lasting memories of childhood, not merely as nostalgia but as integral components of adult identity. In “Me And My Friends circa 1981,” the poet describes:
chocolate
Matisses and Picassos armed
with Crayolas and pastel chalk
would spread out on Lenore St.
to express ourselves
Making our mark on the inner city
in something other than blood.
These marks of youth and their lasting impact, from schoolyard fights to prom night, are never truly abandoned in childhood but are carried throughout lifetimes, sometimes growing smaller and sometimes larger through the scope of memory. Moon's poems acknowledge this by returning to similar themes – responsibility, protection, flight – over and over again, letting their meaning change with repetition as the speaker’s (and the reader's) understanding develops. She Has a Name speaks of both childhood and aging with familiar but striking images. The closing lines of “To a Camellia Blossom” convey the transition from youth to adulthood, the limitless possibilities of childhood to the more realistic contemplation of maturity, with elegant clarity: “Before I knew what / to call you, I reached and imagined / season after season. Unmoored.”
Through growing up and growing older, the family ties that give She Has a Name its strength are not severed, but are altered, and it is in writing these changes that Moon's poetic voice is at its most poignant, tender without becoming maudlin. Describing her own battle with cancer, the mother's voice notes how the afflicted daughter becomes a source of strength and comfort: “we share a phantom cord, now a two-way / lifeline. She tethers what otherwise / would float apart.” In “The Vulnerable Leading the Vulnerable,” Moon addresses the fear at the heart of this collection and of most, if not all, human intimacy – that we will be unable to protect our loved ones from suffering. “We worry over / their safe passage / through tomorrow, / that dusky hole.” Elsewhere, in “Dust,” she writes, “Often all we have / are banged-up blessings.” This is a myth with no heroes, only people trying to be heroic for the sake of those they love.
WHY I CHOSE KAMILAH AISHA MOON’S STARSHINE & CLAY FOR THE RUMPUS POETRY BOOK CLUB
BY BRIAN SPEARS
September 18th, 2017
Kamilah Aisha Moon takes the title for her most recent collection from Lucille Clifton’s poem “won’t you celebrate with me,” which includes the lines: “what did i see to be except myself? / i made it up / here on this bridge between / starshine and clay,” and Clifton’s influence on Moon’s work is evident throughout.
Before I tell you more, a quick reminder that in order to receive your early copy of Starshine & Clay, read along with the Poetry Book Club, and participate in our exclusive chat with Kamilah Aisha Moon, you’ll need to to subscribe by September 20!
It’s some later lines in the same poem mentioned above which stuck with me as I read this collection:
come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
Because while the book does celebrate that survival, it also requires the reader to remember those who weren’t so fortunate, those who were taken too soon. I wish I could say that this is only on my mind because of the recent acquittal of Jason Stockley, the former St. Louis police officer who shot and killed Anthony Lamar Smith, but the truth is that we live in a world where it is unusual for a police officer to be convicted of killing a person of color. The early poems in Starshine & Clay remind us of that. The poem “Angel” begins with an epigram quoting John Eligon of the New York Times where he says Michael Brown “was no angel.” “Staten Island Ferry Ride” has the speaker on her way to a march for Eric Garner, and in “Imagine,” Moon asks us to:
Imagine a blonde daughter with a busted car
in a suburb where a brown homeowner
(not taking any chances)
blasts through a locked door first,
checks things out after—
around the clock coverage & the country beside itself
instead of the way it is now,
so quiet like a snowy night
& only the grief of another brown family
around the Christmas tree, recalling
memories of Renisha playing
on the front porch, or catching flakes
as they fall & disappear
on her tongue.
We don’t really have to imagine what would happen in this scenario, not if we’ve been paying attention. The homeowner would have been imprisoned, talking heads would have used the word “thug” more than once, and a million think pieces about the problems inherent in the black community would have found eager consumers across the landscape. That Theodore Wafer was found guilty and sentenced to prison for Renisha McBride’s murder doesn’t change that.
The other sections of Moon’s book also explore life and death and grief in what we might think of as more “natural” ways, though that term doesn’t really do the job for me. Cancer, for example, may be natural but it’s no less violent to the body than a gunshot, and the grief one feels from losing a friend or family member to it is just as intense. Moon also writes about her own health problems in these poems, and those intimate moments recall Clifton yet again.
Starshine & Clay is a beautiful book and I’m looking forward to talking to you all about it in October, as well as talking to Kamilah Aisha Moon about it at the end of the month. Subscribe to the Rumpus Poetry Book Club by September 20, get your copy of Starshine & Clay before anyone else, and participate in our exclusive chat with Kamilah about the collection!
Brian Spears's first collection of poetry, A Witness in Exile, is now available through Louisiana Literature Press, and at his personal website. He is the Poetry Editor for The Rumpus, and teaches poetry at Drake University. More from this author →
‘Starshine & Clay’ by Kamilah Aisha Moon
Review by July Westhale
February 11, 2018
To be clear, this is America
& we are not deer
We are not deer
We are not dear
here
— “The Emperor’s Deer”
There is a reason why, in times of political duress, one sees poetry books more prominently displayed in bookstores. There is a reason why readership spikes, why poets write more essays, calling people to the word, to the world. It is because poets are our fiercest ambassadors, our biggest advocates. It is because for poets, focusing on presence in a volatile world—well, that’s just business as usual.
Moon’s Starshine & Clay offer a much-needed testament to the world’s beauty and shortcomings. The poems in this collection occupy a broad range of perspectives—historical, personal, forgotten (or, in a culture of white supremacy and militarized police presence, erased). The poems move gracefully and resoundingly from page to page. While they present many characters and points-of-view, the most astounding component of the manuscript is how not okay these realities are—the realities that deadly systems of oppression manifest in approximately one million ways every day, every moment.
Can’t live here. Can’t live upright now. Just here,
he was. Too quiet, nothing bangs the screen door
or needs new shoes, nothing eats my cooking
or does homework at the kitchen table.
The sky closing, my daughter’s mind collapsing
like her baby brother on the grass.
— “Samir Ricer, Tamir’s Mother”
Business as usual, here, is survival. Which, one can argue, is what those living in margins write about. This collection is beautiful and harrowing and terribly vital. There’s nothing ordinary, nothing common about Moon’s writing, which holds a bright light to darkness and says, come forward.
Starshine & Clay
By Kamilah Aisha Moon
Four Way Books
Paperback, 9871935536956, 128 pp.
September 2017
RELATED POSTS: