Kin

Oral traditions, '60s and '70s protest poetry, present-day ""slam"" poetics and the considered compactness of page-oriented lyric are all fair game in Williams's debut. A Cornell MFA, Williams has also been a Nuyorican regular, and the exhortations, elegies and homages of the book reflect a careful awareness of code switching--""Ivy and candied yams don't mix."" Following the title, much of the work in the first half of the volume focuses on the speaker's adoptive interracial family; others address her network of friends, writers and artists of previous generations or ""The First Time I Saw Flo-Jo."" An especially striking evocation takes readers to ""Greg's Beautification Shop"" in Washington. D.C.: there, ""The hours between Noon and dusk are the difference/ between good gossip and `child, that's old news.' "" A mordant poem to ""Mr Sausage Lips"" admonishes him, ""don't be sneakin seconds/ when u ain't done wit the first/ don't be offering biscuits/ to folk who ain't hungry "" Williams's triumphs can evoke June Jordan's poems of adolescence, or Kevin Young's more recent depictions of black family life. Her lesser work is hard to distinguish from that of other poets who mine the same themes, or who embrace a rhetoric of flat assertion. (""Ode of the Hoodoo Woman"" lets readers know that ""it was my high school boyfriend/ who may have never learned being a man means/ not dumping your girlfriend on the Prom eve."") Yet the fact that ""I've eaten rabbit in Rome, paella in Barcelona, couscous in Morocco, and am seated at the worst tables by mentally challenged Maitre'd's who think my big ass is there for coffee"" calls for straight talk, and Williams steps up unflinchingly. (June)