How black writers shed light on America—if we read them
St. Trigger by Aaron Coleman
52 pp // Button Poetry // 2016 // $14.00
Threat Come Close by Aaron Coleman
90 pp // Four Way Books // 2018 // $15.95
Back in 2016 when the US was on the precipice of electing as president a human airsick-bag full of all the worst distillates of American rot, a feisty little press called Button Poetry sent me a review copy of St. Trigger, the prize-winning chapbook by emerging poet Aaron Coleman. It must be said, I am by no means qualified to write poetry reviews-prose has always been my language and my cage. Even when I endeavor to read important poetry and nonfiction I always keep a novel on the side. Fortunately, St. Trigger had no qualms about taking my hand and showing me the way-like the "kerosene lamp aglare in your distance" beckoning us to join Coleman's ancestral journey Northward.
"Go back where you came from white man" Building on rhythm and anguish and enchanting linguistic surprise, Aaron Coleman writes poetry for the people, not for fuddy-duddy academia. Listen:
[.] I make a cradle
of these made-criminal hands: black, escaped, free, native, rare
(from "The Great Dismal Swamp")
Caught up in my own personal whirlwind in the 2016-2018 era, somehow I missed it when Coleman published a full-length collection of titled Threat Come Close. Reading St. Trigger I knew Aaron Coleman was a writer to be reckoned with; an emerging voice to pay attention to. Threat Come Close confirms and surpasses that notion.
Shotgun wedding of words and meaning
Through poems that often create their own form, Coleman guides us on a journey through miles and generations of exhilarating peaks and dismal swamps. navigating by constellation stories dancing across rupturing skies. Look at "St. Trigger": scattershot of words on a centerfold sideways. As unique a poem as I've ever seen, interpretable as thousand different poems depending on how your eye flicks around the page, on how your mind is triggered by words and imagery. Like a crowd of nameless ghosts crying out, I'm here, it sweeps over you and you can't stop looking, can't stop searching, can't stop connecting. I want a poster of this poem.
In St. Trigger Coleman introduces a new litany of saints whom we all hold dear and who guide (or misguide) us through our days and decisions. In Threat Come Close he expands upon this new holy order to include the transparent space between generations, the shattering experience of uncertainty, what it's like to fall from any height, and the mundane terror of being Other.
Knowing a writer vs. knowing their words
I should disclose that I know Aaron Coleman personally-or rather I did. Back then I knew him as AC, a shambling soft-spoken giant with unremitting boyish charm who'd scatter the offensive line like porcelain bowling pins, pulpifying anyone unlucky enough to be holding the football-and then peel you up from the field's new divot with a pat on the helmet and a quiet kind word of encouragement before dropping back into position like a lanky grizzly bear awaiting the next salmon run. Too often I was that salmon!
With AC I fared better in the shot & discus outfields-scrabbling together on JV, fetching implements for the more skilled throwers, in it more for the fresh air and exercise than anything else. We spent most of the time filling that air with bullshit and philosophy and frequently got yelled at for excessive gabbing. Back then I had no idea AC was a writer. Hell, I had no idea I was a writer; we were focused on other things.
"The soft dark rope of prayer and dream"
Aaron Coleman is a writer who commands words to his bidding-but he's more satyr than sergeant. For example, take "On Acquiescence": a lyrical narrative of JV basketball shenanigans at the end of which comes a sudden growing up. But it's more than just a sports rivalry gone wrong.
To acquiesce means to accept reluctantly something you don't like or can't control. But if you know words and roots you know acquiescence means quieting down (as from a place of opposition) and reading the poem's melee and subsequent reflection: "Off at this distance, I hold less noise and more silence" each line takes on a whole new harmony of consent and silence and resistance. And you know it was intentional because he's already given us a skymap of his connection with words and language in dictionary poems like "Rich" that conjugate definition itself into fractal human stories.
It's that kind of discovery that sends you flipping back and forth through Threat Come Close looking for more clues in the wordplay. There's nothing linear about this book; it's more like an escape room full of shards of history and blackness and boyhood hardening to manhood. The clues are all there if you can quiet your mind and put them together.
Uncomfortable American truths we struggle to remember
The suburb where we both grew up is one of the most diverse in Michigan. Not only black folk and religious minorities but also adjacent to the largest settlement of Middle Eastern culture groups outside of the Middle East.
But underneath that privilege lay a festering systemic problem. Many of us grew up proudly colorblind, thinking skin-color minorities had it fine in America, and that any problems with racism came from a handful of bad apples.
The thing about that phrase though? The rest of it is. spoil the whole barrel. The whole barrel. America isn't a free country full of racist people. It's a racist country full of free people. The mold and rot is ingrained in the staves. Sure we learned about Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement-but we learned it as ancient history. Done and dusted.
We didn't learn it was one climactic act in an ongoing epic. We didn't learn about red-lining. We didn't learn about the Tulsa Massacre. We didn't learn that George Washington enslaved people or that his "wooden dentures" were actually made from people's teeth he owned.
We didn't learn that our country got rich because of slavery.
Open-minded doesn't mean not ignorant
Reading Coleman's poetry a few years ago brought home the realization about how much I'd been missing in my carefree upbringing among black friends and black neighbors-and didn't even know to ask about.
Our track-field philosophy was mostly about girls and homework and whether our coach was effective or just a dick.
I don't recall us ever talking about what it's like to be a young black man in America. Not even conversationally with this kid I hung out with for a couple hours every weekday for 3 years. I had no clue.
I had no clue security guards would follow him through the mall. No clue he knew people personally who'd been killed by police. No clue he'd be passed over for summer jobs if he didn't keep his wild curls trimmed tight and tame.
Hell, I very much remember arguing successfully that Jews have been persecuted around the world for thousands of years yet find a way to succeed and thrive, so why can't black people after just a few hundred years of oppression? Twenty years later, that tw0-dimensional ignorance still haunts me.
And now we're in the middle of the next act of the Abolish Slavery Movement, awakening to the fact that this is participatory theater. While some in the audience still don't get the plotline, still say, sit down, shut up , still say, your truth is subject to my beliefs , still say, your black body belongs to the state.
"Being hands held high above head, body blown open" Threat Come Close is lashed with pain and powerlessness like scars knit across the bowed shoulders of an entire people. But it also sings songs of hope and sensitivity, and of delight in the noticing of things; and exudes a joyful glee in its work of mythological dot-connecting. This work threatens to create a narrative powerful enough to lead enslaved people to a new kind of freedom.
It's the defiant act of calling those scars a tattoo and endowing every bloody stroke with the forward-flying power of storytelling and American black magic.
It's the living prayer that each new hashtag bodybag will be the George Floyd we desperately needed-and it's the resilience to survive the innumerable and endless heartbreaks of American blackness.
Listen: His voice deep and low, his smile broad and fast. Still that boyish charm, that uplifting and crushing twinkle:
Each poem threads a threat writ large and explicit-or buried deep between the thin black lines of lust, love, and longing. But it's there. A glimpse of what it's like to grow up black in America.
"The bent wire grip of the lantern I don't want"
Take "Interstate" for instance, inscribing a tiny moment on a northeasterly roadtrip pinpricked with meaning by a simple observation:
To be alive and black surrounded by such isolated white
is now an antique brutality, a traditional form
of American chaos
Most of us wypipo will never experience such a threat, such aloneness in the crosshairs of context.
I told someone recently that I was trying to read more black authors to balance my Hemingways and Thompsons and McCarthys. The response they gave me? "Don't cherrypick, that's racist in the other direction. Just read whatever's good regardless of their race." But we know that's not true. We know that stifled voices become hoarse with shouting. We know we've lost thousands of years' worth of black voices because no one would publish them, because their literacy was illegal, because they were picking cotton instead of spilling ink.
We owe it to those voices to give them a little more emphasis, a little more amplification.
'By any means necessary' includes molotov cocktails
A line from "Manmade Shelter Beneath Rupturing Sky" seems prophetic now, two years after it was branded in black on white:
[.] You won't let yourself
look away from the burning shed as the structure tears
down in pieces of cindered darkness
in the middle of the storm in the middle of the night.
There's something instinctive and inescapably human about being mesmerized by fire. The suspended potential of power and destruction. the energy and the loss. the light and the heat and the contrast with the dark.
Threat Come Close captures that deadly balance; that flickering between energy and body, between give and take, between life and death and love and hate-and somehow bottles it in several dozen simple but infinite poems that are more like paintings that keep your eye and mind moving with the same brilliant network pattern that maps galaxies and internet links and colonies of mold.
Find yourself triggered and fire all boosters
I'm not one for selfish prayer-and AC would probably laugh with friendly scorn to hear me say this-but I pray that circumstances let this man write a novel one day.
Look: if you're not ready to reflect on uncomfortable American truths and threats you don't understand and imperfect naked black bodies, don't read Threat Come Close. But if you are-Coleman's words will echo in your thoughts long after you turn the final page. And you'll be better for it.
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Paul Blumer is a writer wrestling with relearning America and reframing freedom—from the fraught fictions of our forebears to the twisted talons of tumescent tyranny. He is the founder of Quillpower.
