Customer Reviews

The Maverick Room: Poems

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The debut collection of poetry by Thomas Sayers Ellis (co-founder of The Dark Room Collective, a gathering place for young African American poets), The Maverick Room showcases a new and original voice in American poetry, one marked by inner-city youth culture energy that is part lyrical narrative, part "Parliament Funkadelic", a blind of chaos and control through the sheer and simple power of words. The Roll Call: Any half-decent rapper/Can conjure the dead,//Can reach into graves/And accuse God//Of Indian-giving./The trick is ancestral,//No more magic than memory's/Hidden strings & chains.//Trust me,/We haven't forgotten a name.//Say them. Raise your hands./Holler at me!

Thomas Sayers Ellis is an authentic voice straight out of DC. No pretension involved, just giving it to you like you want it...real, raw, and funky. I've always been proud of where I and my family come from and Ellis just makes me prouder. The Maverick Room sings while slappin' elitism in the face, laughs while laying out the innate rhythm of the Chocolate City before you on the page like steak & potatoes on a platter...substance is what this collection provides. You'll be full, but you'll still want more. I definitely recommend The Maverick Room to lovers of poetry and anyone who wants to experience a different, but equally important side of the Nation's Capitol.

Sayers Ellis is perhaps best known for founding the Dark Room Collective, a group of African-American writers living communally in a house on Inman Street in Cambridge. The Collective was born during the funeral of acclaimed writer and Harlem native, James Baldwin. Upon Baldwin's death, Sayers Ellis and others such as Sharan Strange and Kevin Young felt keenly a lack of "black literary voices" and sought to fill the void.

Sayers Ellis is a poet who turns musical scores into words and phrases with his pen. His work lives on rhythm. He says: "All it takes is two beats to dance. Da-Da. That's what I'm doing with my writing, making it get up. Get up, poem."

In college, Sayers Ellis focused on his poetic education, but "attempted to disrupt formal training by apprenticing [him]self to funk." He relates a story of being on the road with Grandmaster of Funk George Clinton. Clinton confided that he'd "arrived at funk by 'speeding up the blues.'" Sayers Ellis decided to do the same with The Maverick Room's "Atomic Bride"--a modern riff on a classic poetic form, the villanelle.

Much of The Maverick Room contains what Sayers Ellis calls "identity repair" poems such as "No Easy Task" and "The Dollar Signs of Autumn." He's spent decades figuring out how to be "black" in a poem: "First, you'll need a talk, then a kind of walk."

The Maverick Room is as kinesthetic as it is poetic. In poems like "Marcus Garvey Vitamins," Ellis replaces technical, formal devices with "trick moves" such as italics.

Although his work is racially conscious, to suggest that Sayers Ellis limits the political content of his poems to the issue of race is to fall into the trap of skin-deep analysis--something his writing works hard to defy. "All Their Stanzas Look Alike" digs at all the formal institutions of literature: from poet laureates to rejection letters, writing contests to tenure tracks, the Caucasian queen of literary criticism, Helen Vendler, to the self-made African-American Empress of the book club, Oprah Winfrey.

Sayers Ellis isn't exactly a stranger to such institutions; he's widely anthologized, published, and the recipient of several fellowships. Ellis says that "all poems perform," and he knows how to perform them.

Thomas Sayers Ellis' debut work, The Maverick Room, has "urban" written all over it. It is an edgy and thought-provoking collection of poems. In it Ellis acts as our tour guide as we travel with him -- and immerse ourselves in his view of the language of hip hop and pop art, the neighborhood, family, culture and much more.

I might not be the best person to review poetry but I was moved by his concise, almost stark manner of writing. His emotions shine through. I kept thinking of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (my favorite poet), and although their poetry is different in so many ways -- because both men's thoughts are for their own particular time, their messages are both timeless.

If you like gritty, urban, thought-provoking poems, this volume is for you.