It's not over once you figure it out

by Isaac Pickell

A linguistically experimental and socially engaged collection of poems that examines questions of colorism within an economically driven world. In a collection of poems that collapses the spectrum between the theoretical and the personal, that is at once intimately lyric and researched, Isaac Pickell travels through various borderlands of space, memory, and identity in search of an “original shade.”  In failing to find what he’s looking for, the poet is equally drawn to the beauty and cruelty of a world addled by capitalism, careening the reader into collisions with complicity and possibility. Enigmatic and striking, It’s not over once you figure it out offers rich, layered poetry that is tender with its subjects of generational trauma, liberation, and the Black and Jewish experience.

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, Paperback

Published December 12, 2023

About the author

Isaac Pickell is a Black and Jewish poet & PhD student in Detroit, where he teaches and studies the borderlands of black literature. He is author of the chapbook everything saved will be last (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) and It’s not over once you figure it out, a full-length collection forthcoming from Black Ocean Press. Isaac’s taken a seat in all fifty states and has so much to look forward to.

Reviews

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m always at the mercy of that William Wordsworth poem, “The World Is Too Much With Us.” Like the title alone serves as refrain for all my discontents, or feelings in general, or just navigating the world. It’s not explicitly the impulse of Isaac Pickell’s It’s Not Over Once You Figure It Out, but it’s near rhyme with the opening of Pickell’s book. Maybe Pickell’s title is like the sequel to Wordsworth. Sure, Pickell says. You figured out how oppressive the world can be. But just coming to realize that doesn’t solve it.

It’s a depressing state of mind. And it speaks to the between which is what Pickell’s book unfolds for its reader. In its opening section, the poems register isolation to the point of exclusion. But not full exclusion, because that might actually be preferable to isolation. Instead the poet suffers a world that degrades an individual using many mechanisms. Not the least of which is capitalism. A system adept at fashioning specific kinds of exclusion that people might mistake for belonging, because at least you belong to this idea, this economy. And at least you can look at others, and see how they also feel excluded. Not like you’re going to talk about it with them. You might not be excluded for the same reasons as they are. But imagine there’s a ring of fire around each individual person who’s been excluded, and they each belong to the ring of fire.

That, for me, is the poetry of Isaac Pickell. His poems belong to whatever space can be carved when the world, or the place you’re from, or the dominant culture, sets a fire, and everywhere you look, it rings around your existence. That’s how belonging is set forth, or projected onto you, or just a fact of the matter. Pickell’s poetry is the perspective when all you see is fire. And it’s what he’s been told about why he’s had to live that life. The tales are incomplete.

Or that’s how it feel until the book enters the last section. Where Blackness is portrayed as the cultural bias projected onto people who the culture fits into that Blackness. And Pickell’s personal experience of passing as White but also not passing. And so what I read as Pickell’s between space at the book’s opening speaks to his experience of knowing Blackness as a thing Other people could suffer, and that he himself suffers from knowing about and living in the between of knowing and possibly being seen as, where he could suffer for avoiding being seen, or suffering because someone else decides for him how he will be seen. And what’s interesting about reading the book from beginning to end is how the poems move from a spare style that has an incompleteness for me. For instance, “What Words Won’t Put Me in the Ground” speaking about the “bark” that positions “black” as not yet “human,” still doesn’t lay out the complexity as broadly as “Our Greatest Ambition, to Be Met Somewhere Other Than the Middle.” In this poem, the poet walks in the shadow of the Middle Passage, like they were old shoes. And, for me, it’s this movement from framing exclusion and isolation in the book’s opening to a deeper scope of who Pickell is in that exclusion, and how he can feel the culture penning him into an excluded position, that’s where the book is most compelling.

[Burgi Zenhaeusern · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the first poem on "It's not over once you figure it out" plays with innuendo and expectations to expose stereotypes, esp. around racial identity, to resist easy categorizati0n by refusing to be definable. The poems avoid fitting into prescribed boxes as a matter of survival, starting with the book cover: one of its squares has the admonishment "they will kill you if they see you so you mustn't let them see you" printed again and again, filling its space. What does it mean? Who are "they"? From the very cover onward these are questions the poems ask and explore. They go to the edge of line-breaks; they go to where the seams show and new possibilities may arise. And yes, "It's not over once you figure it out." You must re-read. You must live.

[Elizabeth Jamieson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poignant, haunting and a must read. Isaac Pickell ‘s poetry collection isn’t something you can read once or even just twice. Grappling with the consequences of rhetoric, the intricacies of identify, and how our past helps us understand the urgent issues of our present, this poetry collection is at once timely and timeless.