Please by Jericho BrownNew Issues (Western Michigan University), 2008

When I saw Mark Doty read at The Center, someone asked him, after the reading, if he could recommend a few other poets—this was one of the books that he mentioned. There are three sections of poems in this book, with each section titled after a button on a stereo, though obviously they’re also words with resonance: REPEAT, and PAUSE, and POWER. Music, both as trope and as thing, the idea of song and actual songs and musicians, figure heavily. (Since my musical knowledge skews towards white girls with guitars, I had some fun after reading this sitting at my computer and finding YouTube videos of songs like Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” and “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” (from Dreamgirls) and “Memory Lane” by Minnie Riperton.)

As for the poems themselves, I like how they’re smart and conversational, I like their wryness, and I like that they’re poems that tell stories. There’s casual violence in these poems, a father beating his son with a leather belt, a backhanded slap across the cheek, and racism and dirt and grit and cockroaches teeming in the kitchen, but that isn’t to say they’re unpleasant to read. I like “Track 3 (Back down) Memory Lane” lots, the way it creates the world of a city/neighborhood, Friday-night gambling in Shreveport in the narrator’s grandmother’s house, guns and drugs outside, but inside, a sort of cozy chaos, Minnie Riperton on the stereo. I like how Diana Ross narrates one poem, Janis Joplin another; I like the way poems focused on these cultural figures are interspersed with poems that are highly personal, all about the narrator’s family (mother and child leaving a violent father, but just walking a few blocks then coming back; grandmother scrubbing the narrator’s sister’s neck ’til it bleeds, to get the dirt off, not realizing the “dirt” is just her skin color). Other favorites are “Lunch,” “I Have Just Picked Up a Man,” and “Betty Jo Jackson,” the last of which is about the narrator’s parents when they were still dating and his mother was still “fierce,” “when she still/Wanted a fight” (48).