Read time: about 3 minutes
Back in the day, I used to attend poetry performances almost as often as church. (And I went to church a lot!) Unsurprisingly, I was especially drawn to the words of other Black women, and while like most people I’m made up of a million different influences, listening to sistren speak honestly and lyrically on love, emotion, politics and identity is in the top ten.
(Side note: if you’re a Black millennial from Denver do you remember Cafe Nuba? It’s hot and…?)
Stacyann Chin was one of the poets I always made time to see, so I’m shocked to see that 2019’s Crossfire is her first and only full-length poetry collection. There are poems in here that I heard once 20 years ago and still remember, yet you mean to tell me they’ve been in print less than a decade? How?
Chin is both singular and emblematic. She’s a Jamaican of African and Chinese descent, a out and horny lesbian, a single mom, a documentarian, an activist, a deep lover, and one of the originators of Def Poetry Slam. Her work covers all of this territory and then some, but always through the lens of emotion. We believe and do and move because we feel, right?
It’s those feelings, and how perfectly Chin captures the rage and joy and love and confusion and longing of being fully human in a world with increasingly little tolerance for being so, that have kept her poems in my mind over the years. Revisiting them feels a lot like sitting in a dark cafe/club on a Friday night in your 20s, nibbling words with your beer and allowing yourself to feel what the work week wouldn’t allow.
But it’s not nostalgic. There are quite a few newer poems in this book that address what it’s like to still feel, believe and care deeply about the workings of the world as we get older. There’s grace for questions about what’s coming and how we connect meaningfully to the past. There’s frustration with the frictionless ahistoricity of some modern iterations of the struggle, but no real bitterness.(Although sometimes there’s anger, but that doesn’t automatically equate to bitterness.) Things change, and grow, but not always in the way you hoped. That doesn’t mean they can’t be pruned and nurtured. It doesn’t mean they won’t eventually blossom. It’s words like the ones in this book that help us see how.
She also cusses about the president the way only a Jamaican can, and that alone is worth the cover price.
Meaningful aging and eternal words to Crossfire.
(Fellow readers! While I tend to read with more of an eye for the future, not the past, every once in a while a book reminds me that the life I lived is just as cool at the life I’m living and I think we all need a little bit of that in our spirits now and then. For more diverse poetry that reminds you of the now and the then, check out this booklist, courtesy of our very own Equal Opportunity Bookshop. Full disclosure–anything you buy there will earn both me and the poets pennies. But pennies add up! Now, go and read something good! Peace!)
Equal Opportunity Reader 