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A review by bickie
Counting Descent by Clint Smith
5.0
"I still have a habit of trying to make up
for things I can't understand
by removing all of the evidence." p. 29 - from poem Saturday Morning Routine
"...the audio
guide is telling me how so much
of archeology is conjecture
which is to say just a guess
I wonder how many things
the world has deemed fact
that are actually just presumptions
made by men in robes or glasses
or scrolls full of poems like this one..." p. 57-58 - from poem An Evening at the Louvre
"In their song,
'Last Days Reloaded,'
when Dead Prez said,
taking my own life/
into my own hands
it was the first time I understood line breaks.
It wasn't The Odyssey.
It wasn't Hamlet." p. 61 - from poem Line/Breaks
Many themes weave through this collection, including several poems addressed to "the Black boy" or similar, often from something like a cicada, window, or ocean. Also lineage and history both specific and (Counting Descent, Dissection, On Observing My Home After the Storm) and more general (For Charles, James Baldwin Speaks to the Protest Novel, The Protest Novel Responds to James Baldwin, On the Hardest Days). Many poems focus Black joy (When Mom Braids My Sister's Hair, No More Elegies Today, Each Morning is a Ritual Just for Us, Keeping Score). Many address incarceration, social justice, and the targeting of Black people (Playground Elegy, Counterfactual, For the Boys Who Never Learned How to Swim, For the Taxi Cabs that Pass Me in Harvard Square, From the Cell Block, The Men in Orange, How to Make an Empty Cardboard Box Disappear in 10 Steps). Several poems address the problematic nature of history as it is taught and the white male canon (Canon, An Evening at the Louvre, Line/Breaks, When They Tell You the Brontosaurus Never Existed).
The collection addresses "all of the complexity and mess and joy and distress of being a complex human being, which is to say a human being" (p. 43, from James Baldwin Speaks to the Protest Novel).
for things I can't understand
by removing all of the evidence." p. 29 - from poem Saturday Morning Routine
"...the audio
guide is telling me how so much
of archeology is conjecture
which is to say just a guess
I wonder how many things
the world has deemed fact
that are actually just presumptions
made by men in robes or glasses
or scrolls full of poems like this one..." p. 57-58 - from poem An Evening at the Louvre
"In their song,
'Last Days Reloaded,'
when Dead Prez said,
taking my own life/
into my own hands
it was the first time I understood line breaks.
It wasn't The Odyssey.
It wasn't Hamlet." p. 61 - from poem Line/Breaks
Many themes weave through this collection, including several poems addressed to "the Black boy" or similar, often from something like a cicada, window, or ocean. Also lineage and history both specific and (Counting Descent, Dissection, On Observing My Home After the Storm) and more general (For Charles, James Baldwin Speaks to the Protest Novel, The Protest Novel Responds to James Baldwin, On the Hardest Days). Many poems focus Black joy (When Mom Braids My Sister's Hair, No More Elegies Today, Each Morning is a Ritual Just for Us, Keeping Score). Many address incarceration, social justice, and the targeting of Black people (Playground Elegy, Counterfactual, For the Boys Who Never Learned How to Swim, For the Taxi Cabs that Pass Me in Harvard Square, From the Cell Block, The Men in Orange, How to Make an Empty Cardboard Box Disappear in 10 Steps). Several poems address the problematic nature of history as it is taught and the white male canon (Canon, An Evening at the Louvre, Line/Breaks, When They Tell You the Brontosaurus Never Existed).
The collection addresses "all of the complexity and mess and joy and distress of being a complex human being, which is to say a human being" (p. 43, from James Baldwin Speaks to the Protest Novel).