Simone White’s
chapbook, Unrest, from Ugly Duckling Presse, is a serial abecedarian poem about “writing when it is
forbidden,” (from the publisher’s note) for and from the
contemporary black experience as part of the press’ dossier series.
White dialogues with a variety of voices and touches upon culture in
this serial poem that is as much about human identity as it is about
racial identity.
It’s a handsome
chappie, and dense, layered, full of small quiet moments such as
staring her cat n the eye, skull to skull, or trying so hard to slide
into designer jeans that are by design tight, uncomfortable, yet
necessary if only to remind us that we live in “a state of
bafflement over own decay.”
The poems of
Unrest touch upon the author’s experience of language in law
school, as well as her experience as a young woman with her own
“weird/ugly thinking about my sex.” Though White is writing
about and from the African American experience, the poems of the
sequence are rooted in the body, in the physical experience of being
alive, which enlarges her subject matter, allows readers who have no
experience with African American culture to walk in her words.
White’s use of
text is editorial as authorial, excerpting a section of David
Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles…to the Coloured Citizens of the
World” as both exigency of the sequence, and as a curator of work,
allowing the excerpt to serve as poem F in the sequence. White
condenses her experience into a timeline of experiences that she
remixes together from her own family to her consciousness. In "Let
the River Run" she waxes about knowledge, how motherhood defines a
woman. This is ripe territory for White who picks up the thread of
gender identity throughout the sequence, but not so boldy as in "P.
Honorifics Lack Specificity" where she wonders about “worship of
her/need to dominate her icon” or what it means to be in
“bafflement over my own decay.” “What must it be like, to be so
far ahead in one’s body.”
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