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Unrest
Unrest began as a spontaneous response to and prayer of thanks for David Walker's 1829 Appeal (the full title is quoted in one section of the series), an uncompromising attack on slavery and performance of black "enlightenment." The serial poem's abecedarian form is activated by thinking about what it means to be deeply engaged in writing when writing is forbidden: the subject(s) of the poems contemplate epic alliances for the black who reads and writes (Shakespeare, Henry James, the poet's sister, and, of course, Ghostface Killah of Wu-Tang Clan), and enacts, reveling in contemporary displays of opulent black speech, experiences of both joy and sorrow.
- GenresPoetry
36 pages, Hand-bound
Published May 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 6, 2023
Simone White is undoubtably one of the most intelligent writers of the last 100 years. But really, probably ever.
September 20, 2013
Simone White’s chapbook, Unrest, is a serial abecedarian poem about “writing when it is forbidden,” (from the publisher’s note) for and from the contemporary black experience as part of the press’ dossier series. White dialogues with a variety of voices and touches upon culture in this serial poem that is as much about human identity as it is about racial identity.
It’s a handsome chappie, and dense, layered, full of small quiet moments such as staring her cat n the eye, skull to skull, or trying so hard to slide into designer jeans that are by design tight, uncomfortable, yet necessary if only to remind us that we live in “a state of bafflement over own decay.”
The poems of Unrest touch upon the author’s experience of language in law school, as well as her experience as a young woman with her own “weird/ugly thinking about my sex.” Though White is writing about and from the African American experience, the poems of the sequence are rooted in the body, in the physical experience of being alive, which enlarges her subject matter, allows readers who have no experience with African American culture to walk in her words.
White’s use of text is editorial as authorial, excerpting a section of David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles…to the Coloured Citizens of the World” as both exigency of the sequence, and as a curator of work, allowing the excerpt to serve as poem F in the sequence. White condenses her experience into a timeline of experiences that she remixes together from her own family to her consciousness. In Let the River Run she waxes about knowledge, how motherhood defines a woman. This is ripe territory for White who picks up the thread of gender identity throughout the sequence, but not so boldy as in P. Honorifics Lack Specificity where she wonders about “worship of her/need to dominate her icon” or what it means to be in “bafflement over my own decay.” “What must it be like, to be so far ahead in one’s body.”
It’s a handsome chappie, and dense, layered, full of small quiet moments such as staring her cat n the eye, skull to skull, or trying so hard to slide into designer jeans that are by design tight, uncomfortable, yet necessary if only to remind us that we live in “a state of bafflement over own decay.”
The poems of Unrest touch upon the author’s experience of language in law school, as well as her experience as a young woman with her own “weird/ugly thinking about my sex.” Though White is writing about and from the African American experience, the poems of the sequence are rooted in the body, in the physical experience of being alive, which enlarges her subject matter, allows readers who have no experience with African American culture to walk in her words.
White’s use of text is editorial as authorial, excerpting a section of David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles…to the Coloured Citizens of the World” as both exigency of the sequence, and as a curator of work, allowing the excerpt to serve as poem F in the sequence. White condenses her experience into a timeline of experiences that she remixes together from her own family to her consciousness. In Let the River Run she waxes about knowledge, how motherhood defines a woman. This is ripe territory for White who picks up the thread of gender identity throughout the sequence, but not so boldy as in P. Honorifics Lack Specificity where she wonders about “worship of her/need to dominate her icon” or what it means to be in “bafflement over my own decay.” “What must it be like, to be so far ahead in one’s body.”
February 5, 2018
The excavation of plausible readerships by this project is something to behold, like many of the parts that don't quite add up to a public-narrational voice, rather remit to the book-project itself. "We should talk about back-handedness, perceiving it, for example, in, 'Thanks for your help.'" There's a first person (plural) and a second person (personal and signified -- i.e., dozenned). There's a proposed "table" across which such signifying will be apprehended in complete irony. The book projects the table but in no way commands it. The Unrest of reception or listening is beautifully invoked by the privacy of a sentence like, "We do our sad disservice together." In this sentence White's speaker abjects in what Leon Forrest calls "wisdom-cutting literature": "Take a bath, man," Billie Holiday said. "Don't explain."
December 28, 2015
A rumbling, raucous, experimental and yet somehow entirely cohesive book, dancing eagerly between bitterness and hope. Firmly anchored in the crux of our generation's great woe--how to find even a little bit of peace in all this violence, or a bit of solace amid chaos.
April 26, 2017
(Twin boy,
don't I know a serious band when I see it?
Everybody sees me walk around Manhattan
live as the day I was born,
optic terror of the Americas.
Quick bright thug eye, oil/gas man,
whatever. All small hells are heavens.
Thrill and rip. Press my neck,
prehistory comes out at the throat.
Thought yields before flesh in sound,
same as it ever was, he wrote.)
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews