Maafa

“Do we have any black women in the epic hero position?” Holiday (A Jazz Funeral for Your Uncle Tom) asks in this potent and surprising collection. In wide-ranging, long-lined, critical, and at times darkly comic poems, Holiday reckons with genocide, generational trauma, capitalism, and empire, writing: “the paradise/ we say we love is dread.” Through excellent use of enjambment (“We certainly laugh a lot at our own/ witnessing”), each poem offers a political critique that subverts conventional possibilities of what a poem can do, such as when Holiday renders into metaphor an image of fascism at once profound and unsettling—“fascism has a pact with spring”—and answers her own rhetorical question, “What’s between a miracle and a nightmare? Whiteness?” Offering a Black, female hero—one who has been refused such status by the norms of society and culture—Holiday delivers poems that are wide-ranging, beautifully subjective, and intensely focused. Holiday’s vision, innovation, and skill are gifts to contemporary poetry. (Apr.)