Customer Reviews

Poems of the Black Object

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I had great hopes for this book, and initially was very intrigued, thinking I'd found one more book on HYPHEN's chosen list of Asian American poetry books that would satisfy me (most did not). I'm learning a lot about what I like and don't care for in poetry, and this book had bits of both. Actually, I can't say I didn't care for anything in this book, but it just didn't take me with the force of impressive, moving, monumental work which I hope for in the best of poetry.

HYPHEN's editors write: "Grotesque, visceral, violent and erotic, Wilson's poems take the physicality of the body as a locus from which to "[i]dentify with the fractured self, the process of the it forced apart by language." Moving from strange lyrics to even stranger prose poems and essays, Wilson plunders the limits of language to apprehend and deconstruct race and sexuality."

That is honest; so be forewarned - about the "grotesque, visceral, violent and erotic". The same could be said of "Howl" but at least there, I could recognize a meaning of profound compassion and connectedness. Here, I find a lot to disturb and shock, "empty signs" as a review above says - eg "Herman the German", an adult film star. There are also passages about bathroom sexuality, excrement and urination. Yes, this is grit. This seems a display, though, a description of the artifacts of eyeing what's usually unseen. Wilson says "I tear out my song, not yours," and that's fine. His song is informative to a certain extent, but I find it didn't ultimately deliver me to a more complete place of understanding. One reviewer feels the circle comes to compassion in the end, but I didn't feel the strength of that emotion. "The Dead" near the end, is a litany of dead - pointlessly dead people, yet it seems cynical to me. The president says "This is our tragedy" and his face is "a pink pout, blooming after the escaped." That's not compassion to me, that's more like the bitterness of not being seen or cared about. Which is a fine emotion to express (and maybe I didn't understand this poem), but I wouldn't confuse it with compassion. Perhaps some poets feel compassion is too trite to waste their immense talents on.

I found some words about the poet's mother intriguing - for example, she's said to throw her bag at a foul-mouthed actress. Whoa, really? And how does that play out in her relationship with the poet? That would have been interesting. There seems to be a lot of love there, but I wanted to know more about this interesting person in the poet's life.

I don't feel race and sexuality were "deconstructed" for me; simply, I get that the body is there. It has wants, it experiences. And is not quite sure what to do with all that.

But hey, what do I know. This book won awards.

If our origins emerge from the mix (mestizaje) of the history and politics of desire that arrive before we do, then impel us into being, in Poems of the Black Object Ronaldo V. Wilson takes hold of that root in language, compelling it to yield this prismatic expression in its most vivid contemporary living idiom. The lines gleam along a sharp edge and snap. Poems of the Black Object feels hard and fresh as if physically cracked open--like raw seafood at the ocean's edge.

A Zen koan asks: What was your original face before you were born? (Or in another version: What was your original face before your parents were born?) In Ronaldo Wilson's deft, muscular poems, one's own original face emerges from the risk-fraught present moment in all its specificity (urban circumstances, the multiplicity of encounters) as if from underwater. Lifted through a radical grace of articulate prowess, desire arises even when brutalized or amputated, or cauterized by openness ("Who will taste the salt in my mouth? Feel the endless rip of the sun, its yellow light forced against the petrified pine.") Refracted back through his own earlier intense (and intensely imagined) memory and sensation, the book ends with meditations on the suffering of others--a compassionate outward blossoming of the figure of "the black body." This is a tremendous achievement.

----Sesshu Foster