Customer Reviews

Kin

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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

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.

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.

In "Kin" Crystal Williams shows the multiple and overlapping meanings that "family" can have. Her own complex family dynamic informs her poetry, but so do her relationships with her friends, her idols, even strangers. "In Search of Aunt Jemima" is one of the best explanations of "personhood" one could hope to read.