In or, on being the other woman, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life. Throughout this book-length poem, White writes through a hybrid of poetry, essay, personal narrative, and critical theory, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist.
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. A meandering and dead-serious meditation challenging the centrality of Black Music to black poetry and black critical theory, Dear Angel of Death proposes disinvestment in the idea of the Music as the highest form of what blackness "is." This long essay includes many forms: philosophical divergence on the problem of folds for black life, a close reading of Nathaniel Mackey's neverending novel From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, and an impassioned defense-cum-dismissal of contemporary hip hop's convergence with capitalism.
Unrest began as a spontaneous response to and prayer of thanks for David Walker's 1829 Appeal (the full title is quoted in one section of the series), an uncompromising attack on slavery and performance of black "enlightenment." The serial poem's abecedarian form is activated by thinking about what it means to be deeply engaged in writing when writing is forbidden: the subject(s) of the poems contemplate epic alliances for the black who reads and writes (Shakespeare, Henry James, the poet's sister, and, of course, Ghostface Killah of Wu-Tang Clan), and enacts, reveling in contemporary displays of opulent black speech, experiences of both joy and sorrow.
Is all black desire corrupt? If American aspiration is linked to the desire to have whiteness, be male and make money, what, now, can a decent person want? Family, death, power, Poetry and blackness—each is implicated in a general failure of perfection and subjected to furious lyric re-thinking in Simone White's work; a poetry of ideas where "the whole limbic system [becomes] an event," "decorous" and profane, precise and bewildered.
