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"Every day your mouth opens and receives the kiss the world offers, which seals you shut though you are feeling sick to your stomach about the begiining of the feeling that was born from understanding and now stumbles around in you--the go-along-to-get-along tongue pushing your tongue aside. Yes, and your mouth is full up and the feeling is still tottering--"


This was an interesting poetic work. I am of two minds of it, and I realized something crucial about this book half-way through it that affected my experience with it overall--but I'll get to that later, first I want to talk about what I like about it:

I liked the style and form of this book. It is obviously a meta-celebration of modern/contemporary art--and works well in that respect. I liked the modern paintings and artwork featured in this book, I know there is also an interactive component that you can use by going to the poet's website, but I wanted the experience primarily as a book. It gives a lot of young artists a chance for exposure outside of the confines of the "art world." I can say from a formalist point-of-view it is a pretty enjoyable book.

Now, I am going to make a personal, highly subjective observation which is that I would have enjoyed this book more if I were "white." This book mainly concerns the everyday phenomenon which is experienced by all "minorities" called . It is something that is done so much, so-matter-of-factly, that one gets used to it (or rather by it) fairly quickly, like a mosquito-bite. One experiences it all the time, I experienced it today when I was at the store, but usually it does not slow you down if it is kept on a base-level. The more the "majority" is in a particular place, the more intensified these microaggressions get (which is how, for example, black people living in the U.S. northeast experience, on average, more intense moments of microaggression, than those living in the southeast of the country oddly enough. Of course, the tradition of more violent macro-aggression, means nothing in the former Confederacy is done on a "micro" scale). I am reminded by what James Baldwin says in his essay "Many Thousands Gone" (and to a lesser extent in "Everybody's Protest Novel") about works like Citizen. This book is--to me--essentially Abolitionist literature. That is how it works its magic. The message is one that folks need to hear, but I ain't part of that audience. If one is not an African-American man from D.C., I don't know what to say. "Everybody" else should read this.

My favorite part of this book is the section on at the 2006 World Cup. This was the part of the book where the form and the message came together in perfect harmony for me and will probably be the section of the book I will keep coming back to in the future.

"In our image of the Negro breathes the past we deny, not dead but living yet and powerful, the beast in our jungle of statistics. It is this which defeats us, which continues to defeat us, which lends to interracial cocktail parties their rattling, genteel, nervously smiling air..." - Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin.