In her first book-length collection of poetry, Crystal Williams utilizes memory and music as she lyrically weaves her way through American culture, pointing to the ways in which alienation, loss, and sensed "otherness" are corollaries of recent phenomena. Williams writes about being adopted by an interracial couple, a jazz pianist/Ford Foundry worker and a school psychologist, and how that has affected her development as an African American woman. She tries to work out the answers to many difficult questions: in what way do African American artists define themselves? What do they owe the culture and what does it owe them? To what extent does our combined national memory inform our individual selves? These poems are steeped in the black literary tradition. They are brimming over with the oral tradition that Williams perfected while spending years on the poetry "slam" circuit. This, combined with her musical upbringing, give the collection not only a sense of urgency, but also a rhythm, a breath all its own. Kin tackles not only racial issues, but also the troubling realities of violent acts that can occur, especially in our inner cities. But more importantly, the landscape that Williams creates offers readers an alternative to the racial/political dichotomy in which we all live. Overall, the book resonates with a message of reconciliation that will leave the reader uplifted.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Oral traditions, '60s and '70s protest poetry, present-day "slam" poetics and the considered compactness of page-oriented lyric are all fair game in Williams's debut. A Cornell MFA, Williams has also been a Nuyorican regular, and the exhortations, elegies and homages of the book reflect a careful awareness of code switchingA"Ivy and candied yams don't mix." Following the title, much of the work in the first half of the volume focuses on the speaker's adoptive interracial family; others address her network of friends, writers and artists of previous generations or "The First Time I Saw Flo-Jo." An especially striking evocation takes readers to "Greg's Beautification Shop" in Washington. D.C.: there, "The hours between Noon and dusk are the difference/ between good gossip and 'child, that's old news.' " A mordant poem to "Mr Sausage Lips" admonishes him, "don't be sneakin seconds/ when u ain't done wit the first/ don't be offering biscuits/ to folk who ain't hungry " Williams's triumphs can evoke June Jordan's poems of adolescence, or Kevin Young's more recent depictions of black family life. Her lesser work is hard to distinguish from that of other poets who mine the same themes, or who embrace a rhetoric of flat assertion. ("Ode of the Hoodoo Woman" lets readers know that "it was my high school boyfriend/ who may have never learned being a man means/ not dumping your girlfriend on the Prom eve.") Yet the fact that "I've eaten rabbit in Rome, paella in Barcelona, couscous in Morocco, and am seated at the worst tables by mentally challenged Maitre'd's who think my big ass is there for coffee" calls for straight talk, and Williams steps up unflinchingly. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
A public poet of the oral tradition, Williams is a fixture at New York's Nuyorican Poets Caf and on the reading and slam circuit. The poems in this debut collection are conscious of voice, performance rhythm, gesture, and posture. Equally important, though, are the value and nuances of the word: "In some old men there is a softness/ in voice a hint of dusty Alabama/ summers of boyhood & swagger/ of their walk whispers of past/ glories." There is swagger, hip humor, and sassiness to Williams's poems. We encounter her family, including her father ("You were jazz and leather on a rainy day,/ soft and pliable") and mother ("When I die/ I will wear/ the face of my mother,/ gladly"). The concept of family is extended, though, and its effects are visible in many quarters of society. Her view of the world is clear and real, and the souls her poems conjure forth get to preen, strut, and dance, as Williams evokes the streets and the off-white corridors of the republic. Recommended for public and academic libraries, especially those with poetry, women's literature, and African American collections.DLouis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Potential in some, pain in others.,
By
This review is from: Kin (Paperback)
Crystal Williams, Kin (Michigan State University, 2000)
I knew I was in for a bumpy ride when the second line of the first poem of this book contained the word (or phrase, I never can tell with such typographical tricks) "dust y". Oh, boy. Someone else who thinks that putting spaces in the middle of words, and words in odd places on a line, makes something poetry. I was wrong, for the most part, for which I am quite thankful. Crystal Williams' Kin (rather like Trish Reeves' In the Knees of the Gods, reviewed above) seems to have a split personality. Part of that personality writes very good poems. They're not great, they could still use a spot of work here and there before they get to the point where they melt the hair off your head and cause you to fall to the ground in epileptic seizure, possessed by the spirit of Polyhymnia, but they're pretty well on their way. The other part of that personality commits the only sin worse than writing message poems full of vague judgment words: it writes message poems full of vague judgment words written in dialect. Just as Hollywood blockbusters contain emotional shortcuts to tell you how the characters feel rather than take the time to show you (the main reason so many Hollywood movies suck), poems like this figure that all you need to know about the situation can be contained in the dialect in which the poem is written. Why use images to show your angry black woman is angry when you can simply write in dialect? Because the end result will suck, pure and simple. And such is the case here. It almost seems to me as if the book is comprised of two types of poems, poems that were written for publication in magazines/journals/whatever and slam poems. And this collection is just another volume adding more ammunition to my argument that no one will ever write a piece fitting the latter description that will ever be a tenth as good as any poem that fits the former description. The evidence is here, stark, in black and white, impossible to ignore. There is some good work here. In fact, the majority of the book is good work. But the bad parts are awful, and you'll have to wade through more than a few of them to get the good stuff. ** ½
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
from Ai, Author of Vice: New and Selected Poems,
By A Customer
This review is from: Kin (Paperback)
In these poems, she captures memories as if they were fireflies and shows the us the world through her eyes, a world where a black woman must confront not only racial stereotypes, but class and sexual barriers, yet keep it together and keep it real. She riffs language with her saxophone, metaphorical pen and she takes us into her family as if we were family too, back from a long journey and fills us in on everything we've missed, good bad and in between. I especially enjoyed the poems about her family.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Versatile, insightful, candid, funny, smart, memorable poems,
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Kin (Paperback)
The poetry of Crystal Williams showcased in Kin is versatile, insightful, candid, funny, smart, memorable, emotionally compelling and direct. Tower: Ivy and candied yams don't mix.//What must it have been to be the first/black bud beneath ivy-veiled stones./There you were, breath soft/and quickly obscured. Crossing, climbing/with hoisted ancestor-eyes, making your way to sit at back?/To sit. To sit and listen, your mind whittling, haunted/music popping your veins. And then to hunch/beneath a flicking light. Where was that and/what must it have been?//These certainties://Yams are not indigenous here./To sow them one must toil/under rigorous sun. To reap/them backs must bend, arms must reach./And there you were, sowing and reaping./And here we are sowing, reaping,/listening for a kindred voice/singing, sanging, sangin' softly, 'chil.
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